Tap, the sound came against the hull. Tap-bang.

IX

In love, if love be love, if love be ours,

Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:

Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

We fled into the crew quarters, Gawain and Modred, Vivien and I ... quietly as we could, but Lynn and Percy lifted their heads from their pillows all the same. We started taking off boots, settling down for a little rest.

“Where’s Lance?” Gawain asked, all innocent.

“Dela called,” I said, from my cot where I had lain down next Lance’s vacant one; and Gawain’s face took on an instant apprehension of things. Viv looked up from taking off her stockings. I closed my eyes and folded my hands on my middle, uncommunicative, trying to shut out the sound from the hull. It was down to a familiar pattern now ... tap-tap-tap. It grew fainter. I thought of the tubes like branching arteries. Maybe they were working somewhere farther up, at some branching. I imagined such a thing growing over the Maid, a basketry of veins, wrapping us about. I shuddered and tried to think of something pleasant. About the dinner table with the artificial candles aglow up and down it, dark wood set with lace and crystal and loaded with fine food and wines. I would like a glass right now, I thought. There were times when I would have gone to the gallery and stolen a bottle. I didn’t feel I should. Share and share alike, my lady had said; and the good wine was a thing we would run out of.

Supposing we lasted long enough.

There was silence. I opened my eyes.

“It stopped,” Percy said, very hushed.

“Whatever they’re doing,” Modred said, “they’ll have it done sooner or later. I’m only surprised it’s taken this long.”

“Stop it,” Vivien said, very sharp, sitting upright on her bed, and I rolled over to face them, distressed by Viv’s temper. “If you’d done your jobs,” Viv said, “we wouldn’t be in this mess. And if you did something instead of sit and talk about it we might get out.”

“Someone,” Lynn said, “might go out on the hull with a cutter.”

“In that?” Percy asked. That was my thought; my stomach heaved at the idea.

“I could try it,” Lynn said.

“You’re valuable,” Modred said. “The gain would be short term and the risk is out of proportion to the gain.”

Like that: Modred’s voice never varied ... like Viv’s sums and accounts. I had had another way of putting it all dammed up behind my teeth. But the crew wasn’t my business, any more than it was Viv’s.

“What are you going to do?” Viv asked. “What are you doing about this thing? Our lady depends on you to do something.”

“Let them be,” I said, and Viv looked at me, at me, Elaine, who did my lady’s hair and had no authority to talk to Vivien. “If it was your job to run the ship you could tell them what to do, but they’ve done everything right so far or we’d none of us be alive.”

“They left us grappled to this thing. Was thatright? They talkedto that thing instead of breaking us loose on the instant. Was that right?”

“Grappling on,” Modred said, unstoppable in locating an inaccuracy, “was correct. We would have damaged the hull had we kept drifting.”

“And talking to it?”

“Let them be,” I said, because that argument had bit them: I saw that it had. “Maybe it was right to do. Wasn’t that our lady’s to decide, and didn’t she?”

“Griffin,”Viv said. “Griffin decides things. And he wouldn’t be deciding them if the crew’s incompetency hadn’t dropped us into this. We were in the middle of the system. You can’t jump from the middle of the system. And they did it to us, getting us into this.”

“We were pulled in,” Gawain said. “There wasn’t any warning. No evasion possible.”

“For you. Maybe if you were competent there’d have been another answer.”

That was Vivien at her old self again: she did it in the house at Brahmani Dali and sent some of the servants into blank. Now she tried it on the crew. I sat up, shivering inside. “Maybe if Viv’s hydroponics don’t work out, shecan go out on the hull,” I said. It was cruel. Deliberately. It left me shivering worse than ever, all my psych-sets in disarray. But it shut Viv down. Her face went white. “I think,” I said between waves of nausea my psych-sets gave me, “you’ve done all the right things. So it breaks through. It would do it anyway; and so you’ve talked to it: would it be different if we hadn’t? And so it’s got us; would we be better off if we’d slid around over the surface until we made a dozen holes it could get in, and it grappled us anyway?”

They looked at me like so many flowers to the sun. Percy and Gawain and Lynn looked grateful. “No,” Modred said neatly, “the situation would be much the same.”

Viv could scare them. She could scare anyone. She had my lady’s ear ... at least she had had it when she did the accounts; and she had that reputation. But so did I have Dela’s ear. And I would say things if Vivien did. I had that much courage. Dela’s temper could makethe crew make mistakes. She could order them to do things that might endanger all of us. She could order Lynn out on the hull. Or other dangerous things.

“We’re supposed to be resting,” I said. “It’s against orders to be disturbing the crew.”

“Oh. Orders,” Viv said. “Orders ... from someone who skulks about stealing. I know who gets tapes they’re not supposed to have. Born-man tapes. I suppose you think that gives you license to tell us all how it is.”

“They might do you good. Imagination, Viv. Not everything comes in sums.”

That capped it. I saw the look she gave me. O misery, I thought. We don’t hate like born-men, perhaps, but we know about protecting ourselves. And perhaps she couldn’t harm me: her psych-set would stop that. But she would undermine me at the first chance. I was never good at that kind of politics. But Viv was.

It didn’t help my sleep. I was licensed to have that tape, I thought; I was justified. My lady knew, at least in general, that I pilfered the library. It was all tacit. But if Vivien made an issue, got that cut off—

I had something else to be scared of, though I persuaded myself it was all empty. Bluff and bluster. Viv could not go at that angle; knew already it would never work.

But she would suggest me for every miserable duty my lady thought of. She would do that, beyond a doubt.

The hammering started up again, tap, tap, tap, and that hardly helped my peace of mind either. We quarreled over blame, and itmeanwhile just worked away. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling, shut them with a deliberate effort.

Everyone settled down then, even Vivien, but I reckoned there was not much sleeping done, but perhaps by Modred, who lacked nerves as he lacked sex.

I drowsed a little finally, on and off between the hammerings. And eventually Lance came back—quietly, respecting our supposed sleep, not brightening the lights. He went to his locker, undressed, went to the bath, and when he had come back in his robe he lay down on his bed next to me and stared at the ceiling.

I turned over to face him. He turned his head and looked at me. The pain was gone. It could not then have gone so badly; and that hurt, in some vague way, atop everything else.

I got up and came around and sat on the side of his bed. He gave me his hand and squeezed my fingers, seeming more at peace with himself than he had been. “I was not,” he said, “what I was, but I was all right. I was all right, Elaine.”

Someone else stirred; his eyes went to that. I bent down and kissed him on the brow, and his eyes came back to me. His hand pressed mine again, innocent of his difficulties.

“Griffin knows,” I warned him. I don’t know why it slipped out then, then of all times, when it could have waited, but my mind was full of Griffin and dangers and all our troubles, and it just spilled. He looked up at me with his eyes suddenly full of shock. And hurt. I shivered, that I had done such a thing, hurt someone for the second time, and this time in the haste of the hour.