Alternate Realities (20 page)

“I know Vivien’s,” Dela said. Of course, she knew us all.

“She’s Vivien,” I said, afraid. “And she would be happy if she weren’t.”

‘That’s a strange things to say.”

“Like I’m Elaine,” I said. “And Lance is Lance.”

Dela said nothing at all, not understanding, perhaps, the thing I tried to creep up on, to tell her. She gave me no help. I found the silence heavier and heavier.

“We should
do
something,” Dela said. “It would be healthier if we did something.” She dropped her head into her hands. I patted her shoulder, hating to see her that way.

“We could go help them,” I said. “We can fetch things.”

It was unthinkable, that impertinent
we
. But that was the way it had come to be. Dela lifted her head, nodded, got up, and we went to find the others.

We, my lady and I, as if she were one of us, or as if I had been born.

Finding them was another matter. They had disappeared quite thoroughly when we called to them from the lift on one and the other level.

“The holds,” Dela said, “if they’re going to be hunting supplies.”

So we went to the bridge to track them down, because the
Maid
had a great many nooks and dark places where it was difficult to go and no little dangerous.

Especially now.

So we came to the bridge, and found one of them after all, because Modred was at his post, talking to them, running catalogue for them, as it seemed. We walked in, my lady and I, and waited, not to interrupt. After a moment Modred seemed to feel our presence and turned around.

“Where are they?” my lady asked.

“Middecks hold number one section,” Modred said. “It’s not a good idea,” he added then, with never a flicker. “This operation. But no one argues with master Griffin.”

“Do what he told you to do,” my lady said sharply, and turned and walked out. She had no wish to be told it was hopeless. Neither did I, but I lingered half a breath and looked back at Modred, who had not yet turned back to his post.

“Lynn will die,” Modred said, “if she has her own way.”

“What can we do?” I asked.

“Be glad it will take them days to be ready.”

“And then what?” I asked. “In the meanwhile, what?”

Modred shrugged, looking insouciant. Or dead of feeling. He turned his back on me, which hurt, because I thought us friends, and he might have tried to answer. If there were answers at all.

“Elaine,” my lady called, impatient, somewhere down the corridor outside, and I turned and fled after her.

So we found the rest of them, all but Vivien.

They were on middecks, down the corridors from the crew quarters, and bringing parts out of storage by now, out of that section of the
Maid
that was so cold they had to use suits to go retrieve it; the stuff they set out, a big canister, and metal parts, was so cold it drank the warmth out of the air, making us shiver. “We make a Bridge,” Griffin explained to us. “We’ve got the rigging for it if we improvise. We use our own emergency lock on our side, and grip onto whatever surface we choose with a pressure seal, so we can sample their atmosphere before we break through.”

Dela said nothing to this. I knew she was not sanguine. But Griffin was so earnest, and so was Lynn, and it was what we had to do.

It was a matter of finding everything and then of carrying it all up the difficult areas of the
Maid
, into places our present orientation made almost inaccessible. We had weight to contend with—and Gawain and Percy got up on juryrigged ladders in the impossible angles of passages we were never supposed to use in dock as we were, in places where the hammering outside the hull rang fit to drive us mad. We added to it the sound of drills and hammering of our own, making a rig of ropes that would let us lift loads up the slanting deck and get it settled.

We worked, all that day, fit to break our hearts, and most all we had done was just moving the materials into place and making sure that the area just behind the lock was pressure-tight, and that everything they would need was there. Modred never came, nor did Vivien.

It was, I knew, I think more than one of us knew, only another one of Griffin’s schemes, that Lynn had been convenient to lend him; and if it had not been this, it would have been another. But it kept us moving; and when we had worked all the day, we went to our quarters exhausted, aching in our arms and elsewhere.

Even Lynn—even she looked hollowed out, as if she had finally gotten the measure of what she had proposed doing, and being tired and full of bruises had beaten the mettle out of her. But she had said no word of giving it up. And no one told Lynn it was hopeless.

Not until we met Vivien.

I suppose that Vivien had been in our quarters most of the day; or in some comfortable hole of her own devising. She was there to meet us when we came in, sitting robed and cross-legged on the couch with one of the study tapes running, a soft murmur that drowned out the tappings from outside. I was glad when I saw her, relieved that she was no longer sick: this was the reflex my psych-set gave me, to be so naive.

But Viv knew where to put a shot.

“You know he’ll believe anything now,” she said right off, in that low and proper voice of hers. “So now everyone’s working to build something to kill the lot of us. It’s one project today, and that’s not going to work; and what new one tomorrow? It’s only worse, and he never knew what he was doing. No more than you do.”

We all stood and stared at her, bereft of anything reasonable to say. She got up from the couch like a fire going up, all full of heat and smoke, and we were all disarranged.

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” I said.

“So she gave him the crew and the ship because it’s broken. And the best idea you come up with is going out there with it.”

“It’s all we
can
do,” Lynn said, defending herself.

“Of course, like you didn’t move us until it was too late. That was all your idea too. And now you want to make a way for them to get in as if it weren’t happening fast enough. You never knew what you were doing.”

“Shut up,” I said. But Lynn just sat down, elbows on her knees—not staff, Lynette, not prepared against lies that we who dealt with born-men knew how to deal with. The crew was innocent and told the truth. Vivien worked at them in painful ways. “It was all your doing, Viv,” I said, “that tape, everything—I know who would have taken it. I know who could be a thief in our quarters. I should stop feeling sorry for you. Everything that ever happened to you, you brought on yourself.”

“I took that tape,” Percy said in a faint voice, very loud in that quiet. “I did, Elaine. I never expected—
that
... I never ...”

I felt cold all over. I just stood there, wishing that someone would say something, even Viv. Percy’s voice trembled into silence, asking answers, and I had never meant to hurt him, not Percy, not any of them.

“We’re none of us right,” Percy said, looking at me, at Lance. “If we weren’t supposed to have it—what is it? And why?”

How do you make sense of a whole life in a why? I shook my head, looked at all the pain I had made, at Lynn who was trying to kill herself, at Gawain who had lost all his cheerfulness and gone sullen; at Vivien who had turned on us; at Percy that I had named a thief, when there was no one more kind and gentle, not even Lance. “The why won’t make sense,” I said. “But there were people like us a long time ago. Born-men. We can’t be what they were. Or maybe never were.”’

“They were ourselves,” Gawain said, finding his voice.

“No.”

“I never saw myself that way,” Gawain said distressedly, far from hearing anything I said. And it was so: that Elaine, myself, me, I—there was no sorting it. She was far more live than I: she loved.

And what did their images—but love, and want, and struggle—things far more live than they? I knew the Lancelot who stood behind me now, who gently put his big hands on my shoulders. And oh, what was Vivien’s pettiness to
that
Vivien’s malice; or Percy’s kindness to
that
Percivale’s goodness; or Lynn’s bravery to Lynette’s? We tried to live, that was what; we caught sight of something brighter and more vivid than ourselves and we wanted that.

Even Vivien—who, wanted power, who was made and not born, and who knew nothing about love in either case. She struggled to be more than she was and narrow as she was, it threatened her sanity.

“Oh Viv,” I said aloud, pitying.

“Oh Viv,” she mimicked me, and turned away, playing the only role she knew how to play, the only one her psych-set and her name fit her for. I stood there trembling.

“Don’t listen to her,” Lancelot said, his fingers pressing my shoulders.

“She’s not to blame,” I said. “It’s all she can see.”

“So what do we do?” Percy asked. “Elaine?”

“We do what we see to do.”

“Where’s Modred?” Lance asked suddenly.

A silence among us.

“It’s not right,” I said, “to think about him the way the tape is. Modred’s not changed. It can’t have affected him, not
him
. We can’t all walk off from him. And we can’t treat him like that.”

“He won’t say anything about it,” Percy said. “He won’t talk.”

“He wouldn’t,” Gawain said.

“He’s still working up there,” Lynn said, from where she sat, her arms about her thin knees. “He’s convinced about his program. He still hopes for that.”

“He
wouldn’t
do that,” Percy said. “Against orders. Not on his own.”

Lance’s hands were heavy on my shoulders. “Maybe somebody ought to see about him.”

“Let him be,” Gawain said sharply.

“What’s he up to?” Lance asked. And when Gawain stood there staring back at us: “Gawain, what’s going on up there?”

Still no answer. Lance let go my shoulders and turned for the door. Gawain started after him and I spun about, “Lance,” I cried. “Gawain—”

Gawain overtook him at the door, but there was no stopping Lance when he was in a hurry: he shrugged off Gawain’s hand with one thrust of his arm and kept going.

I heard laughter at my back; and not laughter at all, but a very bitter sound, unlike us. I looked back past Percy and Lynn, at Vivien.

“Percy,” I pleaded, “Lynn, come on—someone stop them.” I headed for the door, knowing everything amiss.

I
ran, and was too late for the lift. But Gawain was not: he and Lance were headed topside together, in what state I hated to imagine. Percy and Lynn came running after, and caught me up by the time the lift, empty, had come down again.

“Modred’s his partner,” Percy said, meaning Gawain’s, meaning where loyalties lay. Lynette said nothing; it was like that between them, I thought, while the lift shot us up topside: that Percy and Lynette worked together, were together, that while it was Gawain most often Lynette bedded with—blithe and light Gawain—it was Percivale who worked with her, close, close as ever we could be; like Modred and Gawain.

The door opened and let us out: I ran, but Lynette and Percy ran faster, for the doors where already we heard shouting.

The doors were closed. Locked. Of course, locked. Modred knew his defenses.

“Open up,” Lance shouted, and slammed the sealed door with his fist. But he was staff: he had no right to command the crew. And Gawain stood there doing nothing to help until Lynn and Percy came running up ahead of me. “Order him to open,” Lance asked of them, and Lynn: “Modred,” she called. “Modred—” But gently, reasonably.

From inside, no answer.

“Ask him,” Percivale asked of Gawain. “He’ll listen to you.

“I doubt it,” Gawain said. And so there we stood, the several of us—oh, it was terrible the look of us, of Lance and Gawain face to face and glaring at each other—

“It can’t happen,” I said, tugging at Lance’s arm. “O Lance, go and fetch my lady. He’ll listen to
her
. Please. We’re what we always were. We can’t have changed; and he can’t. O run, run and tell her. Modred’s not well.”

He yielded backward to my tugging at him—like tugging at a rock, it was; but I put myself between the two of them—him and Gawain. Too proud to back very far: I saw Lance’s eyes. “Percy,” I said, “go.”

And Percy ran. The lift had worked again, down the corridor. Vivien was there, and I could see she was satisfied ... O the malice, the bitter, bitter malice that her makers never put into her, but the place had given her, and the ruin of all she was.

“What,” she said, “has he shut you out then?”

“Be quiet,” Gawain said. “We don’t need you here.”

“Modred,” Lynette called, gently, using the com by the door. “Modred, are you all right in there?”

“He’s gone over the brink,” Lance said. “Modred, come out of there. We’ve sent for my lady. She won’t be amused.”

Silence from the other side.

“Maybe something
has
happened to him,” I said, fearing more and more. “We aren’t right to think the worst of him.”

“He hears us,” Lance said. “His partner knows what he’s doing. I’d bet on it.”

I looked at Gawain, whose beautiful face was flushed with anger, whose eyes had no little of fear: Lance could beat him, and there was no doubt of that.

“Wayne,” Lynette said, “you covered for him? You
knew?
”

“Should I let you kill yourself and the rest of us?”

Lance reached out very deliberately and took Gawain’s arm, brushed me aside as if I had not been there. “We have orders,” Lance said.