Pilferage now ... borrowing ... that we could do. I got up and got the tape I had pilfered out of the library and set the hookups over by the couch for Lance and me, figuring that he needed an escape just now. He wanted only to lie there staring at the ceiling, but I took him by the hand and pulled at him until he stirred out of bed and came; and then he put the sensors on himself and took the drug gladly enough when I gave it to him. I got a blanket and my own rigging fixed, drugged out and settled in, hoping for something good.

It was a story tape: I had thought so from where I pilfered it; but it was one of those, one of Griffin’s, that could almost kill you with fright. I knew when I was still sliding into it what it was going to be, and I tried to open my mouth to yell out to Percy or someone to help, get it off us, pull us out of it, but I must have been too far gone. No one came.

Only the story got better. Lance and I were in it together, and while it was more bloody than I liked, I found myself enjoying it after all. That was it: once you give your mind to one of these things, especially if you’re down, that means the drugs have got your threshold flat and you’re locked into the tape, so that you’ll agree to whatever happens. I lived it. Lance did, to whatever degree he could, according to his own pre-programming. Probably he was what I was, which was a hero, and very strong and extraordinarily brave and angry. Griffin had a passion for such stories, of angry men. For a little while I could handle anything at all: I was a born-man; and I fought a great deal and sometimes made love to a very beautiful blonde lady who reminded me of Dela. Lance would have loved that. And I’ll bet the men he fought were all Griffin; but for me they were Robert, that I killed a dozen times and enjoyed it more thoroughly than I liked to think about when I finally woke out of it.

But when I did wake up I knew for sure it was not the kind of tape that we were ever supposed to have, not at all, because it was violent, and bloody, and all my psych-sets were disturbed. Lance was that way about it too, and avoided my eyes and seemed to be thinking about something. So I figured I had better get this one back into that library before it was missed.

We candeceive, at least I could, and Lance could, and probably all of us. Vivien and Lynette and Modred were too cold to play games ... or to talk much with born-men, a silence which was deception of another kind, when they had reason to use it. At least that trio wouldn’t get up and sneak about some project for their own personal pleasure.

But Modred, now....

Modred was the one I went to when I wanted a tape back in the library undetected, a ride up in the lift toward the bow, up to the bridge where duties were still going on. No one suspected Modred of nonsense like tape-pilfering; and he wouldtake my orders, because the operational crew maintained the library and were always pulling references to this and that through the computer. If I wanted a tape for my own use for a while, it was nothing for him to spin a tape through and record it, and then do things with the records of its use. It was even less for him to play with the records and drop a tape into the chute for the automated sorting to whisk back to its slot in the rack back in library. He could do that and never miss a beat in what else he was doing, and I think he really preferred the more complicated larcenies: they were problems, and this was not.

Modred and Gawain. Wayne, we called the one, for short: he had long brown hair, and was very handsome—but he was all business whenever I would see him, given to working himself very hard. He was the mainday pilot, as Lynn ran things on alterday shift, and Percy was alterday comp. Gawain had a work compulsion, which tended to make Gawain lose weight when we were on long trips, but he really enjoyed what he did, and smiled a lot when he was working. Me, with my psych-set to worry about other’s pain, I always carried him his dinners when he forgot them and when I happened to be awake on the same schedule; and I did the same for Modred, who shared his shift and also worked too much and got too thin, but who never showed exuberance about it. Modred was the only one but me whose name we never shortened to something sensible, because when we did it came out Dread, and that was just too much like him to be clever. Modred had a beard as black as Percy’s was red, one of those jawline-following thin ones, but very heavy despite how close he cut it, and while Gawain let his hair go down to his shoulders for vanity’s sake, Modred had his cut very short—Lynn and Percy played barber, among other skills—and he cut it square across his brow, which made his dark eyes very sinister. That was why my lady Dela named him Modred, and I think why she bought him, because she was fascinated by dangerous-looking men. Even born-men moved out of Modred’s way, and that was a useful thing with some of the guests Dela had had. Not that Modred would hurtanyone, being like us, psych-set against it, but he looked like he would, and people reacted to that. Actually, he seemed to enjoy doing me small favors I asked, and getting small attentions from me and from Lynn when she was in the mood. Mostly that grim face—handsome, because my lady would not have had him about otherwise—seemed to me to conceal a very blank sort, who did his duty, who thought and calculated constantly, and who liked, like the rest of us, to sleep close at night, with someone close enough to let him feel companied. Vivien avoided sleeping next to him, somewhat scared of him, truth be told—and I always preferred Lance. So mostly Modred, really sexless, slept with his crewmates, who were also sexless during the voyages, and they kept each other company. Likely those four were neither concerned nor jealous about the freedom Lance and Viv and I had to come and go with my lady, to be in attendance on her, to share her luxuries, and in my case, to share her lovers—because they four were psych-fixed to the Maid, and when Modred or the others handled her controls, I think it was really like touching the body of a lover. It was a sort of grim joke, the stainless steel Maidand her crew doomed to love her with a chaste and forever devotion.

I preferred Lance.

But I flirted with Modred because it was pleasant. I always suspected he liked my touching him ... at least that killer’s face of his acquired a certain placidity like a pet being stroked by a familiar hand. He was not immune to sensation; it was just sex that was missing in him.

“Thank you,” I whispered in his ear, leaning close, when he settled back into his place at the console, from disposing of the tape for me. I was not supposed to be on the bridge, any more than Modred was supposed to be doing things to the library records, but supposedwas often a very lax word in my lady Dela’s world: Dela cared nothing about laws or limitations in anyone. As long as the Maidserved well as what she was, an abode of utmost luxury, and an extravagantly expensive toy, then what her living toys did in their off hours was of no concern. We could have held orgies on the bridge and abstracted the whole library to the crew quarters had we liked, and if my lady was in one of her relaxed moods, she would notice nothing.

There were, of course, other moods. Remembering those, we always kept the record purified.

“They’ll be wanting you,” Modred said in his flat way, staring at his screens to find out where things stood at the moment. Gawain was at the main console. I had my hands on Modred’s shoulders and leaned to deposit a kiss on the side of his neck, which, he took about like the touch of my hands, as something relaxingly pleasant. “I think my lady is awake.”

He could do that, never missing the thread of the conversation when I teased him, which was the difference between him and Gawain or Percy, who at least grew bothered.