Superluminal (10 page)

Exhausted, they could no longer sleep. They rose in
miserable silence and dressed, navigating around each other like sailboats in a
high wind. Laenea wanted to touch Radu, to hug him, slide her hand up his arm,
kiss him and be tickled by his mustache. Denied any of those, not quite by fear
but by reluctance, unwilling either to risk her own stability or to put Radu
through another nightmare, she understood for the first time the importance of
simple, incidental touch, directed at nothing more important than momentary
contact, momentary reassurance.

“Are you hungry?” Isolation, with silence as
well, was too much to bear.

“Yes… I guess so.”

But over breakfast (it was, Radu said, evening, so perhaps
it was really dinner), the silence fell again. Laenea could not make small
talk; if small talk existed for this situation she could not imagine what it
might consist of. Radu pushed his food around on his plate and avoided looking
at Laenea. His gaze jerked from the sea wall to the table, to some detail of
carving on the furniture, and back again.

Laenea ate fruit sections with her fingers. All the previous
worries, how to arrange schedules for time together, how to defuse the
disapproval of their acquaintances, seemed trivial and frivolous. The only
solution now was a drastic one, which she did not feel she could suggest
herself. Volunteering to become a pilot might be as impossible for him as
returning to normal would be for Laenea. Piloting was a lifetime decision, not
a job like crewing that one could take for a few years’ travel and
adventure.

Radu stood up. His chair scraped against the floor and fell
over. Laenea looked up, startled. Flinching, Radu turned, picked up the chair,
and set it quietly on its legs again. “I can’t think down
here,” he said. “It never changes.” He glanced at the sea
wall, perpetual blue fading to blackness. “I’m going out on deck. I
need to be outside.” He turned toward her. “Would you —”

“I think…” Wind, salt spray on her face:
tempting. “I think we’d each better be alone for a while.”

“Yes,” he said, with gratitude. “I
suppose… ” His voice grew heavy with disappointment.
“You’re right.” His footsteps were soundless on the thick
carpet.

“Radu —”

He turned again, without speaking, as though his barriers
were forming around him again, still so fragile that a word would shatter them.

“Never mind… just… Oh — take my cape
if you want, it gets cold on deck at night.”

He nodded once, still silent, and went away.

In the pool Laenea swam hard, even when her ribs began to
hurt. She felt trapped and angry, with nowhere to run, knowing no one deserved
her anger. Certainly not Radu; not the other pilots, who had warned her. Not
even the administrators, who in their own misguided way had tried to make her
transition as protected as possible. The anger could turn inward, toward her
strong-willed stubborn character. But that, too, was pointless. All her life she
had made her own mistakes and her own successes, both usually by trying what
others said she could not do.

She climbed out of the pool without having tired herself in
the least. The warmth had soothed away whatever aches and pains were left. Her
energy returned, leaving her restless and snappish. She put on her clothes and
left the apartment to walk off her tension until she could consider the problem
calmly. But she could not see even an approach to a solution; at least, not to
a solution that would be a happy one.

o0o

Hours later, when the grounder city had quieted to night,
Laenea let herself back into Kathell’s apartment. Inside, too, was dark
and silent. She could hardly wonder where Radu was; she remembered little
enough of what she herself had done since he left. She remembered being vaguely
civil to people who stopped her, greeted her, invited her to parties, asked for
her autograph. She remembered being less than civil to someone who asked how it
felt to be an Aztec. But she did not remember which incident preceded the other
or when either had occurred or what she had actually said. She was no closer to
an answer than before. Hands jammed into her pockets, she went to the main
room, just to sit and stare into the ocean and try to think. She was halfway to
the sea wall before she saw Radu, standing silhouetted against the window, dark
and mysterious in the black cloak, the blue light glinting ghostily off his
hair.

“Radu —”

He did not turn. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the
dimness, Laenea saw his breath clouding the glass.

“I applied to pilot training,” he said softly,
his tone utterly neutral.

Laenea felt a quick flash of joy, then uncertainty, then
fear for him. She had been ecstatic when the administrators accepted her for
training. Radu did not even smile. Making a mistake in this choice would hurt
him more, much more, than even parting forever could hurt both of them.

“What about Twilight?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice
unsteady. “They refused” — he choked on the words and forced
them out —”they refused me.”

Laenea went to him, put her arms around him, turned him
toward her. The fine lines around his blue eyes were deeper, etched by distress
and failure. She touched his cheek. Embracing her, he bent to rest his forehead
on her shoulder. “They said I’d never even make it through the
training. I’m bound to our own four dimensions. I’m too
dependent… on night, day, time… My circadian rhythms are too
strong. They said…” His muffled words became more and more unsure,
balanced on a shaky edge. Laenea stroked his hair, the back of his neck, over
and over. That was the only thing left to do. There was nothing at all left to
say. “If I survived the operation… I’d die in transit.”

Laenea’s vision blurred, and the warm tears slipped
down her face. She could not remember the last time she had cried. A convulsive
sob shook Radu and his tears fell cool on her shoulder, soaking through her
shirt.

“I love you,” Radu whispered. “Laenea, I
love you.”

“Dear Radu, I love you too.” She could not,
would not, say what she thought: That won’t be enough for us. Even that
won’t help us.

She guided him to a wide low cushion that faced the ocean;
she drew him down beside her, neither of them really paying attention to what
they were doing, to the cushions too low for them, to anything but each other.
Laenea held Radu close. He said something she could not hear.

“What?”

He pulled back and looked at her, his gaze passing rapidly
back and forth over her face. “How can you love me? We could only stay
together one way, but I failed —” He broke the last word off,
unwilling, almost unable, to say it.

Laenea slid her hand from his shoulders down his arms and
grasped his hands. “You can’t fail at this, Radu. The word
doesn’t mean anything. You can tolerate what they do to you, or you
can’t. But there’s no dishonor.”

He shook his head and looked away.

Laenea wondered if this were the first time he had ever
failed at anything important in his life, at anything that he desperately
wanted. He was so young… too young not to blame himself for what was out
of his control. Laenea drew him toward her again and kissed the outer curve of
his eyebrow, his high cheekbone. Salt stung her lips.

“We can’t —” He pulled back, but she
held him.

“I’ll risk it if you will.” She slipped
her hand inside the collar of his shirt, rubbing the tension-knotted muscles at
the back of his neck, her thumb on the pulse-point in his throat, feeling it
beat through her. He spoke her name so softly it was hardly a sound.

Knowing what to expect, and what to fear, they made love a
third, final, desperate time, exhausting themselves against each other beside
the cold dark sea.

o0o

Radu was nearly asleep when Laenea kissed him and left him,
forcibly feigning calm. In her scarlet and gold room she lay on the bed and pushed
away every concern but fighting her spinning heart, slowing her breathing. She
had not wanted to frighten Radu again, and he could not help her. Her struggle
required peace and concentration. What little of either remained in her kept
escaping before she could grasp and fix them. They flowed away on the channels
of pain, shallow and quick in her head, deep and slow in the small of her back,
above the kidneys, spreading all through her lungs. Near panic, she pressed the
heels of her hands against her eyes until blood-red lights flashed; she
stimulated adrenaline, until excitement pushed her beyond pain, above it.

Instantly she forced an artificial, fragile calmness that
glimmered through her like sparks.

Her heart slowed, sped up, slowed, sped (not quite so much
this time), slowed, slowed, slowed.

Afraid to sleep, unable to stay awake, she let her hands
fall from her eyes, and drifted away from the world.

When Radu woke, Laenea had gone. He slid his hand across the
cushions. The place where she had lain was cold. Radu got up. Slowly, he
dressed.

Outside Laenea’s room, he hesitated. He opened the
door very quietly. Laenea slept soundly, dappled in blue by the light of the
aquarium. When she was ill he had sat by her side for hours, watching her sleep,
but now he felt like an intruder. In silence, he moved into the room and picked
up his duffel bag.

He hesitated, wanting to kiss her one last time, wanting her
to awaken and tell him she had magically discovered a way for them to stay
together. But there was no point in waking her, no point to prolonging their
good-byes. Nothing he and Laenea could say to each other could change anything
now. Pilots did not mix with ordinary human beings. Laenea was a pilot, and
Radu was an ordinary human being. The documents from the pilot selection
committee proved he would never be anything more.

So Radu Dracul closed the door and walked away from Laenea
Trevelyan, whom he had known for such a short time yet loved for so long.

He left Kathell Stafford’s apartment and entered the
elevator. It rose smoothly toward the surface of the sea. No one joined him,
for which he was grateful. He felt incapable of even civility, much less
conventional social pleasantries.

He felt more alone than he had at any time since
Twilight’s plague. After it, he had grown so used to being alone that
loneliness had ceased to bother him; and he had had his dreams. All that was
changed. Reality had overtaken the dreams, fulfilled them, then shattered them
completely.

Outside, in the dark, the sea wind caressed Radu’s
scarred face and ruffled his hair. The smell of rocket fuel tinged the breeze,
but not too strongly to destroy its freshness. The tangy and, to him, quite
alien winds of earth made him homesick for the deep forests and cloud-laden, crystalline
atmosphere of his home world.

He felt he
had
to get away from the spaceport and
away from earth.

A tram waited for passengers on the perimeter track, but
Radu decided to walk. He had plenty of time to get to the control office before
the next shuttle liftoff to Earthstation. He set off down the footpath.

Damp metal surfaces gleamed beneath the powerful lights.
Radu moved from areas of harsh illumination toward patches of pure dark grazed
by moonlight. He was glad of the long walk. It helped him think — though
he knew he would not suddenly come upon some magical idea that would allow him
and Laenea to remain lovers. Nothing would help him do that, but walking fast,
pushing himself, stretching his muscles, felt far better than sitting at the
shuttle gate, waiting and chasing himself in mental circles. Besides, he needed
the exercise. He was used to much more physical labor than he ever did as a
member of a ship’s crew.

He brushed his hand across his hair and his fingers came
away damp with dew or sea spray. That brought him a sudden vivid image of
Laenea, her long dark hair glistening as they walked together through the fog,
their arms around each other, wrapped in her velvet cape. They had stopped at
Kathell Stafford’s party —

Radu halted abruptly, blinking, suspecting a hallucination.
Kathell had packed up the fog-catchers and gaudy pavilions, her friends, and
her servants, and taken the whole party to some other unlikely spot. Yet a
single black-and-silver tent, alone and forlorn, still stood on the gray deck.
The faint night breeze swayed its heavy fringe.

Radu walked toward the tent. It was real. A silver cord held
the front flap open. Inside, Kathell knelt on the satin floor next to her white
tiger.

The great creature’s rough breathing filled the tent.
Radu’s shadow fell over Kathell. She looked up.

“Hello, Radu Dracul,” she said, without
surprise. Radu wondered if anything ever surprised her, or if she had seen and
experienced everything he could imagine, and many things he could not.

Radu entered the tent and sat on his heels beside her. She
stroked the tiger’s shoulder, but it did not respond.

“Why are you out here all alone?” Radu said.

She gestured toward the tiger. “As you see.”

“I mean, why didn’t you come back to your
home?”

“My home?” she said, her voice distracted.
“Do you mean the apartment? But I loaned it to you and Laenea.”

Her matter-of-fact reply prevented Radu from questioning a
statement he thought distinctly odd. He let the subject drop.

“Do you need help?”

Kathell shrugged. “I made everyone else go away,
because I didn’t want them to have to see him die. But I don’t want
him to die, either.”

Kathell’s white tiger was the only member of the
species Radu had ever encountered, so when he had first seen it, he assumed its
color was normal. Perhaps for that reason he noticed the animal’s more
serious mutations, while others saw only its unusual coloring. No healthy
creature walked as the white tiger did, with poor control of its hind legs and
its spine very much too curved; and no carnivore would evolve cross- eyed. To
Radu, the tiger was another example of the extravagance of earth, of things
valued for their appearance rather than for their usefulness or efficiency. He
could not now think of anything to say. His sympathy would sound insincere, for
while he was sorry for Kathell’s distress he saw no reason to regret her
deformed pet’s death. Its passing would release it.