Alternate Realities (19 page)

S
o we came down to main level and got out to take the downside lift—Gawain and I, and Lance carrying Vivien’s rigid weight. Not a flicker from Viv. I stroked her hair and talked to her the while, and Gawain talked to her, but there was nothing.

Only when we had come out into the corridor, lady Dela was there to meet us, on her feet and about as if we had not been hurled who-knew-where. “Bring her to my rooms,” Dela said. “I won’t have her wake alone down there.”

So we brought her to Dela’s own apartments, to lay her down on one of the couches in the sitting room; but:

“The bed,” Dela insisted, to our shock. “That’s easiest for her.”

Surely, I thought, when Lance had let Vivien down there amid the satin sheets, surely if there was a place Vivien would come out of her blank, this was it—in such utmost luxury, in such renewed favor. I knelt down there at the bedside and patted Viv’s face and chafed her stiff hands. “Vivien,” I said, “Viv, it’s Elaine. You’re in my lady’s quarters and my lady’s asking after you. You’re in her own bed and it’s safe, you understand me?”

I doubted that anything reached her. Her eyes kept staring, and that was not good. They would be damaged. I closed them, as if she were dead. In a moment more they opened again.

“Vivien,” I said, “you’re in Dela’s bedroom.”

A blink. I got that much out of her, which was much, considering—but nothing more. Outside, from many points of the ship now, I could hear the hammering.

And Vivien had chosen her refuge from it.

I got up from my knees and looked back toward the door into the sitting room, where a door had opened. Griffin had come in; I heard his voice; and Gawain had gone out there. Lance waited for me, and I went with him to join the others—my lady, and Griffin.

“She won’t respond,” I said very quietly when my lady looked to me for a report, “but her reflexes are back.—It takes time, sometimes.”

“I don’t understand you,” Dela said in distress.
Us
, she meant, compared to born-men. “Why do you
do
that?”

“We aren’t supposed to—” I started to say, and the words locked up in my throat the way things would that weren’t supposed to be talked about.—We aren’t supposed to do things for ourselves, I wanted to say; and blanking’s all that’s left. She had wanted to do something, Vivien had, but she was made, not born, so she had no way out. Alone. Viv was always alone, even with us.

“Don’t any of the rest of you do that,” Dela said. “You hear me? Don’t you do that.”

“No, lady,” Lance said with such absolute assurance it seemed to touch both our born-men, while all about us the hammering continued.

On all sides of us now. So all the preparations we had made, every defense Griffin had planned—all of that was hopeless now.

“Call the others to the dining hall,” Griffin said. “I want to talk to them.”

“Yes, sir,” Gawain said, and went.

So Griffin thought that there was reassurance to give us. O born-man, I thought, we aren’t like Vivien. We’ll go on working now we know the rules, because we know we have work to do for you. You don’t have to reach so far to find us hope.

But seeing Vivien cave in as she had done, Griffin believed he had to come up with something for the rest of us. He looked so distressed himself that it touched me to the heart. It was Dela that went to him and held his hand. And Lance just stood there.

Vivien’s voice. A terrible sound, a shriek.

I spun about and flew into the bedroom. There was Vivien wide awake and sitting up as if from some nightmare, the covers clutched to her breast and that same stark horror in her eyes, but waking now.

“It’s all right,” I lied to her fervently, coming through the door. I ran to her and caught her hands which held the sheets and I shook at her. “Viv, come out of it. You’re in Dela’s room, you’re safe. It can’t come here.”

“Can’t it?” Her teeth chattered. Her hair was mussed, trailing about her face. She gave a wrench to get away from me and I let go. Then she looked beyond me at the others who had come in. I looked around. My lady was there, foremost, and Griffin and Lance. “It’s coming through up there,” Vivien said. “Right into the lifesupport.”

“Maybe we could move the equipment down,” Dela said.

Griffin said nothing. Nor did Lance or I, probably all thinking the same.

“It’s making those things all around us,” Vivien said. “Until it has its tendrils into us and we’re done. Nothing we do is working.”

“We lose the tanks if it gets in there,” Griffin said.

“And then we lose everything,” Dela said. “We have to move the lab.”

“No,” Griffin said. “Come on. Let’s go talk to the others.”

He took Dela with him. I delayed, with Lance, to see to Vivien, who sat amid the bed with her head fallen into her hands. She swept her hair back, then, adjusted pins, beginning to fuss over herself, which was one of her profoundest reflexes. She could be dying, I thought, and still she would do that. For a moment I felt deeply sorry for Viv.

“Shut up,” she said then, when I had said nothing. “Let me alone.” She had a way of rewarding sympathy.

“Vivien,” Lance said, “get up and come with us.”

That was asking for it, giving Viv orders.

“Or we leave you here,” I added.

Alone. Vivien got out of bed then, fussed with her suit and brushed at imaginary dirt. Lance held out his hand for her arm, but she pointedly ignored that and walked out ahead of us.

“We’re due in the dining hall,” I said, being kind, because Viv would have no idea where we were supposed to go and would have had to wait on us otherwise, outside, a damage to her dignity. So she went on ahead of us without a thank you, click, click, click of the trim heels and sway of the elegant posterior and still fussing about her hairpins.

O Viv, I thought with deepest pity, because Lance gave me his strong hand and we walked together; but Viv walked all alone. She was made that way. There was none of us as solitary as Vivien.

Or as narrow. Not even Modred.

We came last into the dining hall, Lance and I and Vivien, but not by much. It was our stronghold, our safe place, the long table under the lion banner, amid the weapons. We could hear the hammering, but more faintly here than elsewhere. We knew our proper seats and settled into them.

“Have we got a location, on the attack?” Griffin was asking.

“Middecks after section,” Modred said, “portside. And topside forward. That’s main storage and the hydroponics. As well as the action at the bow.”

“They’re slow about it,” Griffin said.

No one said anything to that. We were only glad it was so.

“We look forward,” Griffin said then, “to more traveling. To going on and on with this thing. This ship. Whatever it is. But if it travels, it leaves this space from time to time. If we could somehow break loose ...”

“If you’ll pardon me,” Modred said, “sir, the crew has been working on that possibility. It won’t work.”

Griffin’s face remained remarkably patient. “I didn’t much reckon that it would, but spell it out. Mass?”

“Mass, sir. It’s growing with every acquisition, not only the ships, but debris. Mass, and something that just confirmed itself. We’re moving. We have an acquired velocity in relation to realspace and there’s no means to shed it. This mass has been slingshotted as many times as there are ships gathered out there; if we could hazard an unfounded presumption, and even factoring it conservatively, the acquired velocity would itself increase our mass beyond any reasonable limit. We’re a traveling discontinuity, an infinitude, a local disturbance in spacetime. We
are
the disturbance and our own matter is the problem.”

I blinked, my hands knotted in my lap under the table, understanding more of what Modred said than I usually did; but Modred was talking down to us. To Griffin.

“If I could reconstruct what happened,” Gawain said, “something a long time ago either kicked or pulled the original core object into subspace. And either it never had control or it lost it. So it careens along being attracted by the gravity wells of stars and accelerating all kinds of debris into its grasp. It hasn’t got a course. Just velocity. It picks up velocity at the interface and it never gets rid of it. It’s no part of our universe any longer.”

“We
are
in Hell,” Dela murmured, shaking her head.

“Wherever we are,” Griffin said, “we have company. And if we can’t hope to get out of it, then we have to do something about it. Lynette, you had an idea—to breach the core object itself.”

Lynn looked up, eyes aglitter in her thin face.

“I’ve seen a place,” she said, “not so far from the emergency lock starboard. I think we could get into it there.”

“And create what kind of difficulty inside the wheel,” Griffin asked, “if you breach their lifesupport?”

“We’ll rig a Bridge from our own side. Pressure seal. We can do it.”

Our eyes went from one face to another—seeing hope, seeing doubt, one and then the other.

“We could save time,” Modred said dryly, “by opening our own forward hatch and using theirs.”

“We can control matters,” Lynn said, “by building our own lock. By having a way round
behind
their position. We could attach to our upper airlock and have a way to attach either to a tube they might build to our upper section or to attach to the wheel itself and have an access we control so we don’t get trapped.”

“And then they move behind
us
, don’t they? And we don’t know what we’re going to meet in weapons. No. It won’t work.”

“Lynn could be lost out there,” Dela said, adding her force to Modred’s.

“No, lady,” Lynn said. There was that kind of look on Lynn’s face that had to be believed while she was saying it. “I can
do
it. Give me the chance. It’s all that can stop us being trapped.”

“It’s worth the try,” Griffin said.

“Lady,” Modred said.

“I can do it,” Lynn said again.

She wanted to so badly: she said it herself, how it hurt to be useless. We all had this compulsion to serve. And Lynn’s, I thought, might well be the end of her.

“All right,” Dela said.

“Lady—” Modred objected.

“Let her try,” Dela said. “Someone has to do something that works.”

Modred subsided. His face—I had never seen him so out of countenance—He looked like murder.

“Let’s find what we have to use,” Griffin said then. But he sat there a moment, as if some of the strength had drained out of him, while our Beast—we knew now for sure it was more than one—battered at the hull on all sides of us.

“We don’t really have any choice,” Dela said. “We have to do something, and that’s all there is left to do, isn’t it?”

“That’s all there is to do,” Griffin agreed.

“Isn’t—” Viv asked, breaking the silence she had kept in our councils, “isn’t there the shuttle? Couldn’t we get off in that?”

Faces turned toward her. “We could use it,” Gawain said, “not for that—but to get up against their hull. Without breaching our own.”

“And getting back again?” Griffin asked.

“That,” Gawain admitted, “not so likely.”

“The shuttle might end up anywhere,” Lynn said. “It might swing off against the hull somewhere else and we couldn’t control it. The only answer has to be a kind of Bridge. That’s all that has a chance of working.”

“We could get off from the ship,” Viv protested.

“No,” Lance said patiently, having understood things a long time ago, “we can’t. You don’t understand, Viv. The shuttle engines are less powerful than the
Maid
’s. And engines only work here, up against the mass.”

“Where matter exists at all,” Modred added.

Viv simply shut her eyes.

“Don’t,” Dela said. “Vivien, it’s all right.”

Vivien didn’t understand. She simply didn’t want to understand. I think we all knew that much, even Dela, who understood us least of all.

And Vivien opened her eyes again, but she kept her mind sealed, I was sure of that.

“What do you reckon to do?” Griffin asked Lynn. “Do you have it mapped out?”

“There’s equipment and parts in storage,” Lynn said.

“Let’s find it,” Griffin said.

So Griffin launched himself—wherever we were now, and whatever had changed since that leap through space we had made. Dela still sat at table after the others had left, and I did, and Vivien did.

“Might I get you something?” I asked Dela.

“No,” Dela said hoarsely, her hands locked before her on the table. And so we sat for a while. “He has to do something. That’s Griffin’s nature. I couldn’t let him not do something, could I? But we’re in danger of losing Lynn.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid we might.”

“It’s awful, that place out there. It’s a terrible way to die.”

“Lynn’s not that afraid,” I said.

Vivien got up from the table and fled, out the door.

“But some of us are,” I added.

“Vivien’s worthless,” Dela said. “Worthless.”

“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”

“Isn’t she?”

“She was very good, with the books. They’re just not here, now.”

Dela looked up at me, puzzled-seeming. So hard she could be, my lady; but she looked straight at me, not into me, not through me, as sometimes she would. It was as if I had gotten solid enough for her to see. “Do you care?” she asked. “Vivien doesn’t care about anyone at all but Vivien.”

“She can’t,” I said, thinking of that tape,
the
tape, and what wounds
that
Vivien had suffered that our own Viv had shared. Like Modred. Like the rest of us. And Lynn. O Lynette, who had to be brave and brash and find a way to
be
that other self if it killed her. My lips trembled. “My lady—” I almost told her. But I couldn’t face the rage. “Some of us don’t have our sets arranged like that,” I said. “Some of us have other priorities.”