This much I understood of it, that Dela had bought her way out of that problem as she had bought off other people who stood in her way; and if ever Dela could not buy her way through a difficulty, then she threatened and frightened people with her money and what it could do. If Dela felt anything about such contests, I think it was pleasure, after it was all over—pleasure at the first, and then a consuming melancholy, as if winning had not been enough for her.

But the Maidwas her true pleasure, and her real life, and she only brought her favorite lovers to it.

So she brought Griffin ... all gaiety, all happiness as we hurried about the Maid’s rich corridors settling everyone in our parting from Brahmani Station—but there was a foreboding about it all which my lady understood and perhaps Griffin did not; it was months that she would love a man before she thought it enough to bring him to the Maid, and after that, it was all downhill, and she had no more to give him. The dream would end for him, because no one could live in Dela’s story forever.

Only we, Elaine and Lancelot and Vivien; and Percy and Wayne and Modred ... we were always there when it ended; and Lance would be hurt as he always was; and I would comfort him—but he never loved me ... he was fixed on Dela.

So we set off on holiday, to play out the old game and to revel while we could, and to make Dela happy a time, which was why we existed at all.

II

Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, “Where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”

Griffin, as I say, was one of the strange ones my lady Dela picked up from time to time, not easy to fix which of his several natures was the real one, no. I had found him frightening from the start, truth be told. He didn’t laugh often, but much when he did, and he could be mortally stubborn and provoke Dela to rages which came down on all of us and darkened the house at Brahmani Dali for days. He interfered with Dela’s business and talked to Vivien about the books, which ordinarily Dela would never allow—but Griffin did, and had his way about it, amid storms in the country house which would have disposed of less appealing lovers. He wound himself in tighter and tighter with my lady’s business, and that disturbed us all.

He was an athletic sort, who looked rather more like one of us than he did like a born-man; but then, they play games even with born-man genes when women are rich, and Griffin certainly came from wealthy beginnings. Like Lance, Griffin seemed to fill whatever room he was in. He was very tall and slim in the hips and wide in the shoulders ... and he had an interesting, strong-boned face—not so fine as Lance, who was dark-haired and handsome and had meltingly dark eyes, but Griffin was bronzed and blond like one of the knights in the storybook tape. That answered, physically, why Dela had been attracted at the outset.

But Griffin was not, like most of her previous lovers, empty-headed; and he had not gotten pretty by spending all his time taking care of that beautiful body. He was just that way, which left the rest of his time to be doing something else—and in Griffin’s case, that something else was meddling with Dela’s business or lying lost in the tapes. He was one of the few men I ever did know who looked merely asleep under the tapes, and not lackwitted: Griffin did not know how to be ungraceful, I think it was muscle. He just did not collapse when he slept the deepsleep. And when he was awake, he was imposing. He tended to stare through the likes of me, or at very most remembered and thanked me for doing some small extra service for him—a courtesy far greater than I had gotten from most of my lady’s associations, and at the same time, far less, because he could still look through me while he was thanking me. He never bedded with me, and he was the first of Dela’s lovers who had never done that. He stayed to Dela. That fact upset me at first, but he bedded with none of the estate servants male or female either, so I understood it was not my failing: he simply wanted Dela, uniquely and uninterrupted by others—quite, quite different from the usual. I saw them together, matched, blond and blonde, storybook knight and storybook lady, a man full of ideas, a man my lady let into more than the bedchamber. He was change; and he frightened us in strange and subtle ways.

What, we wondered, when she should tire of him?

We had set out from station that morning, and Dela was taking a nap, because we had been up too many hours getting up from the world and getting settled in, and we had gone through a time change. We were, of course, under acceleration and moving a little cautiously when we walked, but nothing uncomfortable: the Maidrarely hurried. Griffin was still up and about, typical of the man, to be meddling with charts and tapes and comp in his cabin; and he wanted a little of my lady’s imported brandy. I brought it to his cabin, which was next to Dela’s own, and since he had not dismissed me I stood there while he sipped the brandy and fussed with his papers.

This time? I wondered. It would spoil all my reckonings of him if he asked me to bed with him now. I stood thinking about it, watching his broad back, no little distressed, thinking of all those tapes he listened to, about murdering and pain. He was altogether imposing under those circumstances. Dela was abed, drugged down; perhaps he felt he needed someone. A lot of people get nervous before jump. I waited. I blanked, finally, went null as my knees locked up, and I was in some pain; blinked alert as he stood up and looked down at me.

“I’m sorry,” was all he said. “Go. Go on. That’s all.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, wondering now if it would have pleased him had I been forward with him: some expected that. I looked back from the doorway. But Griffin had snugged down on the bed on his belly, head on his arms, and looked genuinely content enough: the brandy seemed to have had its effect. So he was happy; Dela would be. That was all I wanted. I went back and took the empty glass, set it on the tray, and left.

It might not be, I was thinking then, so bad a voyage, Griffin simply remaining Griffin: some men changed aboard, becoming bizarre in their fancies and their demands, but he did not. I diverted myself through the library, a simple jog from the corridor that joined his and Dela’s cabin and the outer hall, into the library/deepsleep lab, with its double couch. A touch of a button, the unsealing of a clear-faced cabinet, neat tucking of a tape cassette into my coveralls pocket and off and out the other door, into the same hall and out into the main corridor. Dela never minded, but then, Dela had whims: I kept my borrowings neat and quiet.

The galley then, on lowermost level, and up again to our own quarters, midway in the ship, very nice, very comfortable, after the fashion of things aboard the Maid. Deep, fine beds, the finest sheets, fine as Dela’s own—she never scanted us. Beautiful thick carpet, all the colors rust and brown and cream, a fine curved couch wrapped all the way around the corner, one level behind the other, with multiple deepstudy outlets, and the screens above, on the ceiling. Lance was there, not deepstudying, just sitting on the couch, arms on his knees, looking downhearted and tragic as he usually did at such settings-forth. I had had some thought of using my tapes; I gave it up, and sat down by Lance and took his hand in my lap and simply went into blank again. For us too, it had been too many time changes, and it would be better for Lance when he was rested.

Vivien came in from attending whatever business had occupied her with the station and the undocking, accounts and charges all squared, presumably. Not the least drooping, not a sleekly chignoned hair mussed, but Viv was on our schedule: she had a brittleness to her movements, all the same. And came Percy and Lynette, of the crew, who were on ship’s time and who looked like business as they usually did when we saw them. Percy was a youngish man with red hair and a delightful beard, all very close and delicately trimmed, his great vanity. And Lynn, Lynn was a flat and ethereal sort with an aquiline nose and freckles that had never seen much of any sun, brown hair trimmed as close as Percy’s.