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.”

“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.