“Elaine,” he said sadly. Touched my face as he would have touched Dela’s. “Elaine.”

And he walked away too.

My fault, I echoed in myself. When they all had gone away, I knew who was to blame, who had been selfish enough to bring that tape where it never should have been.

“What’s wrong?” Dela asked at the breakfast table, and sent my heart plunging. We sat, all of us silent: had sat that way. “Is something wrong no one’s saying?”

“We’re tired,” Griffin said, and patted her hand atop the table. “All of us.” He laughed desperately. “What else couldbe wrong?”

It got a laugh from Dela. And a silence then, because some of us had humor enough to have laughed with her if we had had the heart.

O my lady, I wanted to say, flinging the truth out, we’ve heard what we never should; I stole what I never ought; we know what we are ...and that was the terror of it, that we were and were not, locked together in this place apart from what was real.

“Elaine?” she asked, and touched my face, lifted my chin so that I had to look her in the eyes. “Elaine, don’t be frightened.”

“No,” I said. It did her good perhaps, to comfort us. The lion banner looked down on us where we sat at breakfast at the long table among all the deadly things we had gathered. I heard the trumpets blowing when my lady looked at us like that. But louder was the hammering that had never ceased.

Dela smiled at me, a grin broad as she wore for new lovers. But there was only Griffin. It was the banner; it was her fancy moving about her. She smiled at me because I understood her fancy, if Griffin did not—She had her courage back. She had found her footing in this strange place, and there was a look in her eyes that challenge set there.

“I wish there were more to do,” I said.

“There ismore,” Lynette said, suddenly from down the table. “Let us go outside. Let us breach themand see what they are before they come at us. We’ve got the exterior lock—”

“No,” Dela said.

“I’ve been up in the observation deck,” she said. “I’ve seen—if you look very hard through the stuff you can see—”

“Stay out of there,” Griffin said. “It’s not healthy.”

“Neither,” Modred muttered, “is sitting here.”

It was insubordinate. I think my heart stopped. There was dead silence.

“What’s your idea?” Griffin asked.

“Lynn’s got one idea,” Modred said. “I have another. First. If you’d listen to me, sir—my lady Dela. We take the assumption that it’s not hostile. We feed it information. It’s going to stop to analyze what we give it.”

“We feed it information and then what?”

“We try the constants. We establish a dialogue.”

“And in the end we give away the last secrets we have from it. What we breathe, who we are, whether we have things of value to it—I don’t see that at this point. I don’t see it at all.”

Modred remained very quiet. “Yes, sir,” he agreed at last, with that tiniest edge of irony that Modred could put in his flattest voice.

“Modred,” Dela said, tight and sharp.

His face never varied. “My lady,” he said precisely. And then: “I was working on something I’d like to finish. By your leave.

My heart was racing. I would never have dared. But Modred hadno nerves. I hoped he had not. He simply got up from his chair. “Gawain,” he said, summoning his partner.

“I need Gawain,” Griffin said in a level tone, and Gawain stayed. There was apprehension in Gawain’s face ... on all our faces, I think, but Modred’s, who simply walked out.

“He’s very good,” Dela said.

Oh, he was. That was so. That’s why they made him that way, nerveless.

“I’d like,” Griffin said, “monitoring set up below. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“No, sir,” Percy said quietly. “Not hard at all.”

We dispersed from the table; we cleaned the dishes; we found things that wanted doing, my lady and I; and Vivien. There was the cleaning up of other kinds; there was Vivien’s station—

Oh, mostly, mostly after yesterday, after working so hard we ached ... it was waiting now; and we had so little to do that we found things.

We were scared if we stopped working. And Vivien was in one of her silences, and my lady was being brave; and Lance went down to the gym with Griffin as if there had been nothing uncommon in this dreadful day, the both of them to batter themselves beyond thinking about our Beast.

Might Lynn, I wondered, envying that exhaustion—care for a wrestling round? But no. I had not the nerve to ask. It was not Lynn’s style; or mine; and the crew really did find things to do.

Lynn went out in the bubble ... sat there, hour upon hour, as close to the chaos-stuff as we could get inside the ship. She did things with the lenses there. I took her her lunch up there, trying to keep my back to the view.

“You can see,” Lynette advised me softly, “you can see if you want to see.”

I knew what she meant. I wasn’t about to look.

“I could make it across,” she said. Her thin freckled face and close-clipped skull looked strange in the green light from the screens; but out there was red, red, and red. “I could see.”

“I know you could,” I whispered, hoping only to get out of here without looking at the sights Lynn chose for company. “I’m sure you could. But I know the lady doesn’t want to lose you.”

“What am I?” Lynn asked. “One of the pilots. And what good is that—here?”

“I think a great deal of good.” I rolled up my eyes, staring at the overhead a moment, because something was snaking along out there and I didn’t want to see. “O Lynn, what is that out there?”

“A trick of the eyes. A shifting.”

“Lynn,” I said, because I felt very queasy indeed. “Lynette?”

“Elaine?”Of a sudden something was wrong. Lynn rose half out of her chair, pushed me aside; and then—

Take-hold, take-hold, the alarm was sounding: and Modred’s voice: “ Brace, we’re going—”

I yelled for very terror. “Let me out of here,” I remembered screaming, and flinging myself for the hole that led to the bridge. But: “No!”Lynn yelled, and grabbed me in her arms, hugged me to her and I hugged her and the chair and anything else solid my fingers could reach, because we were losing ourselves—

—back again, a blackness; a crawling redness. I held to something that writhed and mewed like the winter winds round Dali peaks, and hissed like breathing, and grew and shrank—

“—another jump,” I heard a distant voice like brazen bells.

“Modred?” another called.

“Griffin?” That was my lady, like crystal breaking.

My eyes might be open. I was not sure. Such terrible things could live in one’s skull, eyeless and unaided in this place. “We’ve jumped again,” the thing holding me said, the voice like wind.

“Are we free?” I cried. “Are we free?” That was the greatest hope that came to me. But then I got my eyes cleared again and I saw the familiar red chaos crawling with black spiders of spots. And the veins, all purple and green, and the thing to which we were fixed. That was unchanged.

“We’re not free.” It was Percivale’s voice, thin and clear. “It jumped again; but we’re not free.”

There was a moment of silence all over the ship, while we understood the terms of our captivity. Like all the ships before us.

“O God,” Dela’s voice moaned. “O dear God.”

“We’re all right.” Griffin’s voice, on the edge of fright. “We’re all right; we’re still intact.”

“Situation stable,” Modred’s cold clear tones rang through the ship. “Nothing changed.”

Nothing changed.O Modred. Nothing changed. I clutched the cushion/Lynn’s arm so tight my fingers were paralyzed.

“You might have been out there,” I said. It was what we had been talking of, a moment/a year ago. “You could have been outside in that.”

Lynn said nothing. I felt a tremor, realized the grip she had on me. “We’re stable,” Lynn echoed. “It must happen many times.”