Alternate Realities (24 page)

When I thought of it, I couldn’t answer why we tried. For our born-men, that was very simple ... and not so simple, if there was no hope. It was not in our tapes—to fight. But here was even Vivien, clutching a spear across her knees, when I
knew
her tapes were hardly set that way. They made us out of born-man material, and perhaps, the thought occurred to me, that somewhere at base they and we were not so different—that born-men would do things because it leapt into their minds to do them, like instincts inherent in the flesh.

Or the tapes we had stolen had muddled us beyond recall.

The sound stopped again, close to us, though it kept on above. “They’ve arranged something, maybe,” Dela said. “God help us.”

“Easy,” Griffin said. And: “When it comes—understand, Dela, you and Elaine and Vivien take your position back just ahead of the crosspassage. If anything gets past us you take care of it.”

“Right,” Dela said.

If.
It seemed to me a very likely if, recalling that flood of bodies I had seen within our lock.

But the silence went on.

“Lady Dela,” Percy said then, very softly.

Dela looked toward him.

“Lady Dela, you being a born-man—do you talk to God?”

My heart turned over in me. Viv’s head came up, and Lance’s and Gawain’s and Lynn’s. We all froze.

“God?” Dela asked.

“Could you explain,” Percivale went on doggedly, stammering on so dreadful an impertinence, “could you say—whether if we die we have souls? Or if God can find them here.”

“Percy,” Viv said sharply. “Somebody—Percy—”

Shut him up
, she meant—right for once; and I put out my hand and tugged at his arm, and Lance pulled at him, but Percy was not to be stopped in this. “My lady—” he said.

My lady had the strangest look on her face—thinking, looking at all of us—and we all stopped moving, almost stopped breathing for Percy’s sake. She would hurt him, I thought; I was sure. But she only looked perplexed. “Who put that into your head?” she asked.

No one said, least of all Percy, whose face was very pale. No one said anything for a very long time.

“Do you know, lady?” Percy asked.

“Dear God, what’s happened to you?”

“I—” Percy said. But it got no further than that.

“He took a tape,” Vivien said. “He’s never been the same since.”

“It was me,” I said, because she left me nothing more to say. “It was the tape—The tape.” I knew she understood me then, and her eyes had turned to me. “It was never Percy’s fault. He only borrowed it from me, not knowing he should never have it. We—all ... had it. It was an accident, lady Dela. But my fault.”

Her eyes were still fixed on me, in such stark dismay—and then she looked from me to Lance, and Gawain and Lynette and Vivien and Griffin and last to Percivale, as if she were seeing us for the first time, as if suddenly she knew us. The dream settled about us then, wrapped her and Griffin too.

“Percivale,” she said, with a strange gentleness, “I’ve no doubt of you.”

I would have given much for such a look from my lady. I know that Lance would have. And perhaps even Vivien. We were forgiven, I thought. And it was if a great weight left us all at once, and we were free.

Vivien, whose spite had spilled it all—looked taken aback, as if she had run out of venom, as if she found a kind of dismay in what she was made to be. Maybe she grew a little then. At least she had nothing more to say.

And then a new sound, a groaning of machinery, that clanked and rattled and of a sudden a horrid rending of metal.

“O my God,” Dela breathed.

“Steady. All of you.”

“They’ve got the lock,” Lynn surmised. And a moment more and we knew that, because there was a rumbling and clanking closer and closer to the makeshift bulkhead behind which we sat. I clenched my handful of spears, ready when Griffin should say the word.

“Helmets,” he said, reaching for his.

I dropped the spears and picked up my lady’s, to help her, small skill that I had. But Percy took it from my hands, quick and sure, and helped her, as Lynn helped me. The helmet frightened me—cutting me off from the world, like that white place of my nightmares. But the air flowed and it was cooler than the air outside, and Lynn took my hand and pressed it on a control at my chest so that I could hear her voice.

“... your com,” she said. “Keep it on.”

I heard other voices, Lance’s and Griffin’s as they got their helmets on and got to their feet. Griffin helped Dela stand and Percy got me on my feet so that I could lean on my spears and stay there. Everything was very distant: the helmet which had seemed for a moment to cut off all the familiar world from me now seemed instead to contain it, the cooling air, the voices of my comrades. It was insulation from the horrid sounds of them advancing against our last fortification, so that we went surrounded in peace.

“Get back,” Griffin said; and Dela reached out her hand for his and leaned against him only the moment—two white-suited ungainly figures, one very tall and the other more suit and lifepack than woman. “Take care of her,” Griffin wished us, all calm in the stillness that went about us.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We will.” We meaning Viv and I. And Dela came with us, a slow retreat down the corridor, so as not to tire ourselves, the three of us armed with spears. Dela kept delaying to turn and look back again, but I didn’t look, not until we had reached the place where we should stand, and then I maneuvered my thickly booted feet about and saw Lance and Griffin and the crew who had determined where
they
would stand, not far behind the bulkhead. Their backs were to us. They had their swords and a few weighted pipes that Gawain and Lynn had brought down, and a spear or two. They stood two and three, Lance and Griffin to the fore and the crew behind. And I felt vibration through my boots, and heard their voices discussing it through the suit com, because they had felt it too.

“It won’t be long,” Griffin said. “We go forward if we can. We push them out the lock and get it sealed.”

“They may have prevented that,” Gawain said, “if they jammed something into the track.”

“We do what we can,” Griffin said.

Myself, I thought how those creatures had gotten up against us, and wrenched the second door apart with the sound of metal rending, a lock that was meant to withstand fearful stress. Modred’s had been a small betrayal; it lost us little. They could easily have torn us open—when they wished, when they were absolutely ready.

“Feel it?” Dela asked.

“Yes,” I said, knowing she meant the shuddering through the floor.

“They can’t stop them,” Viv said.

“Then it’s our job,” I said, “isn’t it?”

The whole floor quivered, and we
felt
the sound, as suddenly there was a squeal of tearing metal that got even through the insulating helmets. Light glared round the edges of the bulkhead where it met the overhead, and widened, irregularly, all with this wrenching protest of bending metal, until all at once the bulkhead gave way on other sides, and drew back, showing a glare of white light beyond. The bulkhead was being dragged back and back with a terrible rumbling, a jolting and uncertainty until it dropped and fell flat with a jarring boom. A head on a long neck loomed in its place. For a moment I thought it alive; and so I think did Griffin and the rest, who stood there in what was now an open access—but it was machinery silhouetted against the glare of floods, our longnecked dragon nothing but a thing like a piston pulling backward, contracting into itself, so that now we saw the ruined lock, and the flare of lights in smoke or fog beyond that.

“Machinery,” I heard Lance say.

But what came then was not—a sinuous plunge of bodies through the haze of light and fog, like a cresting wave of serpent-shadows hurling themselves forward into the space the machinery had left.

My comrades shouted, a din in my ears: “
Come on!
” That was Griffin: he took what ground there was to gain, he and Lance—and Gawain and Lynn and Percy behind them, two and then three more human shadows heading into the wreckage and the fog, tangling themselves with the coming flood.

“Come
on
,” my lady said, and meant to keep our interval: I came, hearing the others’ sounds of breath and fighting—heard Griffin’s voice and Lance’s, and Lynn who swore like a born-man and yelled at Gawain to watch out. We ran forward as best we could, behind the others. “No!” I heard Viv wail, but I paid no attention, staying with my lady.

And oh, my comrades bought us ground. Shadows in the mist, they cut and hewed their way with sobs for breath that we could hear, and no creature got by them, but none died either. We crossed the threshold of the rained bulkhead, and now Griffin pushed the fight into the lock itself, still driving them back. “Wait,” I heard, Viv’s voice. “Wait for me.” But Dela and I kept on, picking our way over the wreckage of the fallen bulkhead, then past the jagged edges of the torn inner lock.

And then they carried the fight beyond the lock, in a battle we could not see ... driving the serpent-shapes outside.

But when we had come into the lock, my lady and I, and Vivien panting behind us—it was all changed, everything. I knew what we
should
see—an access tube, a walkway, something the like of which we had known at stations; but we stared into lights, and steam or some milky stuff roiled about, making shadows of our folk and the serpents, and taller, upright shapes behind, like a war against giants, all within a ribbed and translucent tube that stretched on and on in violet haze. “Look out!” I heard Lance cry, and then. “Percy!”

And from Lynette: “He’s down—”

“Dela—” Griffin’s voice. “Dela—”

“I’m here,” she said, wanting to go forward, but I held her arm. They had all they could handle, Griffin and the rest.

“Fall back,” I heard him say. “We can’t go this—Get Percy up; get back.”

They were retreating of a sudden as the other, taller shapes pressed on them like an advancing wall. I heard Gawain urging Percy up; saw the retreat of two figures, and the slower retreat of three. “Back up,” Griffin ordered, out of breath, and then: “Watch it!”

Suddenly I lost sight of them in a press of bodies. I heard confused shouting, not least of it Dela’s voice crying out after Griffin; and Gawain and Percy were yelling after Lance and Griffin both.

But still Griffin’s voice, swearing and panting at once, and then: “You can’t—Lance, get back, get back.—
Dela!
—Dela, I’m in trouble. I can’t get loose—Modred—Get Modred—”

“Modred,” Dela said. She turned on me and seized my arm and shook at me so that I swung round and looked into her eyes through the double transparency of the helmets. “Let him loose—let Modred loose, hear?”

I understood. I gave her my spear and I plunged back past Viv, back through the lock again and over the debris—no questioning; and still in my suit com I could hear my comrades’ anguished breaths and sometimes what I thought was Lance, a kind of a sobbing that was like a man swinging a weight, a sword, and again and fainter still ... Griffin’s voice, and louder—Dela’s.

“Get them back,” I heard. That was Lance for sure; and an oath: that was Lynette.

I had the awful sights in my eyes even while I was feeling my overweighted way over the debris in the corridors; and then my own breath was sobbing so loud and my heart pounding so with my struggle to run that the sounds dimmed in my ears. I reached the open corridor; I ran in shuffling steps; I made the lift and I punched the buttons with thick gloved fingers, knees buckling under the thrust of the car as it rose, one level, another. Up here too I could hear a sound ... a steady sound through the walls, that was another attack at us, another breaching of the
Maid
’s defense.

Get Modred.
There was no one else who might defend the inner ship, and that was all we had left. I knew, the same as my lady knew, and I got out into the corridor topside and shuffled my clumsy way down it with my comrades’ voices dimmed altogether now, and only my own breaths for company.

I pushed the button, opening it. Modred had heard me coming—how could he not? He was standing there, a black figure, just waiting for me, and when I gestured toward the bridge he cut me off with a shove that thrust me out of the way ... ran, the direction of the bridge, free to do what he liked.

“Go,” his voice reached me over com, in short order, but I was already doing that, knowing where I belonged. “Elaine ... get everyone out of the corridors.”

“Modred,” Dela said, far away and faint. “We’re holding here ... at the lock. We’ve lost Griffin—”

“Get out of the corridors,” he said. “Quickly.”

I made the lift. I rode it down, into the depths and the glare of lights beyond the ruined corridor. They might have taken it by now, I was thinking ... I might meet the serpent shapes the instant the door should open; but that would mean all my friends were gone, and I rushed out the door with all the force I could muster, seeing then a cluster of human shapes beyond the debris, three standing, two kneeling, and I heard nothing over com.

“My lady,” I breathed, coming as quickly as I could.

“Elaine,” I heard ... her voice. And one of the figures by her was very tall, who turned beside my lady as I reached them.

Lance and my lady and Vivien; and Gawain and Lynette kneeling over Percivale, who had one arm clamped tight to his chest, his right. But of Griffin there was no sign; and in the distance the ranks of the enemy heaved and surged, shadows beyond the floods they had set up in the tube.

“Modred’s at controls,” I said, asking no questions. “He’ll do what he can.” And because I had to: “I think they’re about to break through up there.”

My lady said nothing. No one had anything to say.

Modred would do what was reasonable. Of that I had no least doubt. If there was anything left to do. We were defeated. We knew that, when we had lost Griffin. And so Dela let Modred loose, the other force among us.