“The hammering’s stopped,” I whispered. It was so. The silence was awesome. I could hear my heart beating, hear the movement of the blood in my veins. We were so fragile here.

“That’s so,” Lynn said. She let me go and pushed me back, leaned forward to reach the console. “Modred, I get nothing different on visual.”

I managed to get my feet under me while those two exchanged observations. I stared at familiar things and they were normal. And almost I wished for that horrid dislocation back again, that chaos ordinary minds would feel. We were no longer ordinary. We had learned how to live here. For a moment we had been outof this place, and that was the horror we felt; that drop into normal space again. And comfort was breaking surface again in Hell.

“We’re traveling,”I said. Lynn looked at me, bewildered a moment. “We’re traveling,” I said again. “This place moves, goes on moving; we must have reached a star and left again.”

“Yes,” Lynn said with one of her abstracted frowns. “That’s very probable.—Do you copy that, Modred? I think it’s likely.”

“Yes,” Modred agreed. “Considerable speed and age. I think that’s very much what we’re dealing with. We’re a sizable instability. And we grow. I wonder what we might have acquired this time.”

“Don’t.”Dela’s voice shivered through the com.

“We’re old hands,” came Griffin’s. A feeble laugh. “We know the rules. Don’t we?”

“O dear God,” Dela murmured.

Silence then, a long space.

And about us in the bubble, the chaos-stuff swirled and crawled and blotched the same as before.

“Is everyone all right?” Percivale asked then. “Do we hear everyone?”

I heard other voices, my comrades. Lance was there with Griffin; and Gawain. “Elaine’s with me,” Lynn said. “Vivien?”

Silence.

“She’s blanked,” I said. “I’m going.”

“Vivien,” I heard over com, again and again. I felt my way, hand-over-handed my way from the bubble to the ladder and to the bridge ... across it, through the U where Modred and Percivale were at work. “I’m after Vivien,” I said.

“Gawain’s on the same track,” Percivale said, half rising. “She was at her station when it hit—”

I ran, staggered, breaking rules ... but Viv was weakest of us, the most frightened. I had to wait on the lift because Gawain had gotten there first; I rode it up to the uppermost corridors, floors/ceilings with dual orientation, dual switches, that crazy place where the Maid’s geometries were most alien, where Vivien worked in her solitary makeshift lab. I made the inner doors, and there was Lancelot and there was Gawain before me. They knelt over Viv, who lay on the floor in a tuck, her eyes open, her hair immaculate, her suit impeccable; her hands were clenched before her mouth and her eyes just stared as if they saw something indescribable.

They were afraid to touch her. I was. It was not like blanking, this. It was like the wombs. It was—not; because what Viv saw, she went on seeing, endlessly, like a tape frozen-framed.

“Viv,” Lance said, looked at me as if I should have some hope neither of them did. I sank down. I touched her, and all her muscles were hard.

“It’s your fault,” Gawain said, a strained voice. “It’s your fault. That tape of yours—that tape—”

It was Lance he meant. Gawain’s face was the color of Viv’s. His eyes flickered, jerked, searched for something as if he could not get enough air.

“It was my tape,” I said. “Mine. And Viv that stole it. Wasn’t it? But it’s nonsense. It’s not important. It’s—”

“Viv is lost,” Gawain said.

“Lance. Lance, pick her up. I’ll find a blanket.”

He took Viv’s wrist, but there was no relaxing her arms. He lifted her by that limb, got his arms under her, his other arm beneath her knees, and gathered her to him. I scrambled up. “Just get her out of here,” Gawain said. “Let’s just get her out.”

“How is she?”That was Percivale, on com. “Is she all right?”

“She’s blanked out,” I said, looking up at the pickup, above all the eerie tubes and lines and vats and tanks and glare of lights. “We’ve got her. We’re coming down.”

And then the hammering started again.

Not where it had been. But close.

Up here. Above.

“Oh no,” I said, above the chaos of com throughout the ship. “Oh no.”

It was more than here. It was at our side. It was at our bow. We were attacked at all points of the ship.

“Something might have come loose,” Lance murmured, standing, holding Viv’s rigid body in his arms.

“No,” Gawain said, calmly enough. “No. I don’t think so. Get her to quarters, Lance. Let’s get out of here and seal the door.”

XII

... Why, Gawain, when he came

With Modred hither in the summertime

Ask’d me to tilt with him, the proven knight.

Modred for want of worthier was the judge.

Then I so shook him in the saddle, he said

“Thou has half prevail’d against me,” said so—he—

Tho’ Modred biting his thin lips was mute,

For he is always sullen: what care I?

So we came down to main level and got out to take the downside lift—Gawain and I, and Lance carrying Vivien’s rigid weight. Not a flicker from Viv. I stroked her hair and talked to her the while, and Gawain talked to her, but there was nothing.

Only when we had come out into the corridor, lady Dela was there to meet us, on her feet and about as if we had not been hurled who-knew-where. “Bring her to my rooms,” Dela said. “I won’t have her wake alone down there.”

So we brought her to Dela’s own apartments, to lay her down on one of the couches in the sitting room; but:

“The bed,” Dela insisted, to our shock. “That’s easiest for her.”

Surely, I thought, when Lance had let Vivien down there amid the satin sheets, surely if there was a place Vivien would come out of her blank, this was it—in such utmost luxury, in such renewed favor. I knelt down there at the bedside and patted Viv’s face and chafed her stiff hands. “Vivien,” I said, “Viv, it’s Elaine. You’re in my lady’s quarters and my lady’s asking after you. You’re in her own bed and it’s safe, you understand me?”

I doubted that anything reached her. Her eyes kept staring, and that was not good. They would be damaged. I closed them, as if she were dead. In a moment more they opened again.

“Vivien,” I said, “you’re in Dela’s bedroom.”

A blink. I got that much out of her, which was much, considering—but nothing more. Outside, from many points of the ship now, I could hear the hammering.

And Vivien had chosen her refuge from it.

I got up from my knees and looked back toward the door into the sitting room, where a door had opened. Griffin had come in; I heard his voice; and Gawain had gone out there. Lance waited for me, and I went with him to join the others—my lady, and Griffin.

“She won’t respond,” I said very quietly when my lady looked to me for a report, “but her reflexes are back.—It takes time, sometimes.”

“I don’t understand you,” Dela said in distress. Us, she meant, compared to born-men. “Why do you dothat?”

“We aren’t supposed to—” I started to say, and the words locked up in my throat the way things would that weren’t supposed to be talked about.—We aren’t supposed to do things for ourselves, I wanted to say; and blanking’s all that’s left. She had wanted to do something, Vivien had, but she was made, not born, so she had no way out. Alone. Viv was always alone, even with us.

“Don’t any of the rest of you do that,” Dela said. “You hear me? Don’t you do that.”