Superluminal (12 page)

The pause continued.

She was about to give up and go away when the doors slid
quietly open.

“Welcome, Laenea,” Ramona-Teresa said. Her voice
held just that: welcome, without any hint of satisfaction or censure.
“Welcome.”

She stretched out her hand to Laenea, who hesitated,
remembering how it had felt, the last time, to touch Radu. But she and Ramona
were of a kind. She grasped Ramona’s warm, pulseless wrist.

Several other pilots joined them, welcoming Laenea into
their company. She wondered if pilots always hugged to say hello.

She laughed.

o0o

By hurrying through Earthstation from the shuttle to the
transit dock, propelling himself recklessly through the free- fall of the old
station’s central corridors, and barely pausing long enough to show his
ID at the transit dock, Radu managed to reach Atna’s ship before its
departure. He stepped into its self-contained gravity field.

He paused in the control room long enough to regain his
equilibrium and to say hello. The older man stood up to greet him. Atna was
nearly as tall as Radu, but very slender. His skin had begun to acquire the
papery softness of old age.

“I’m glad to have you on board,” he said.
He stood back, his hands on Radu’s shoulders, and smiled. “But
I’m afraid you’ve come in low again.”

“I don’t mind,” Radu said. He was used to
having the least seniority and to drawing most of the ship’s housekeeping
tasks.

Atna gazed at him more intently. “Are you all
right?”

“Yes,” Radu said. “Of course. What do you
mean?”

“I don’t want to invade your privacy,”
Atna said with an embarrassed shrug. “But you know the grapevine. Your
name has been… frequently mentioned on it, in the last few days.
I’ve been concerned for you.”

As a very new member of the crew, and as someone who was
solitary by nature, Radu had little experience with the grapevine, either as
recipient of its information, or — so far as he had known till now
— its subject. He felt uncomfortable, knowing he and Laenea must be the
focus of gossip. He supposed he should have realized before now that they would
be.

“Yes,” Radu said. “I’m all
right.”

“I apologize,” Atna said, and then, with
considerable relief, “Ah, Orca. Come and meet Radu.”

Radu turned. He had not heard the other crew member arrive,
she walked so softly in her rubber-soled red deck shoes. Like many crew members
she dressed flamboyantly. She wore silver pants, a silver mesh shirt, and a
spangled jacket with a pattern like fish scales: silver, gold brass, red
copper. Her skin, set off by her very short, pale, fine hair, was smooth
mahogany tan, and her eyes were black. Her hands were rather large in
proportion to the rest of her.

Radu glanced at her hands again, surprised. She was a diver.

“Hi,” she said, extending her hand. They clasped
wrists, and the translucent webbing between her fingers darkened against the
black cuff of his shirt.

“Radu Dracul, of Twilight,” Radu said.

“Oh,” she said, and Radu had the impression that
she, too, had heard things about him on the grapevine. If she had, she
refrained from asking him any questions. “Orca, of the Harmony Isles, on
earth.” She grinned. “I’m afraid my given name is nearly
impossible to say, out of water.”

Radu had very little time to wonder about a diver’s
being on the crew. Atna sent them both off to finish preparing the ship for
transit. While Orca made the last checks on the engines and Radu shut down all
the semi-intelligents, Atna undocked and eased away from Earthstation. Then
Radu and Orca prepared themselves, and their sleep chambers, and hugged each
other, as crew members always did, to say good-bye.

“Sleep well,” Orca said, and closed herself in.
Radu climbed into his body box, lay back, and pulled the lid shut. The ship
would float gently toward its transit point and pause just long enough for Atna
to shut down the cerebral functions of the navigational computer and send
himself into deep, sound sleep. Then the ship would vanish, diving into
transit. But transit was something Radu knew he would never see.

He caught the familiar sweet smell of the anesthetic, and
fell instantly asleep.

o0o

As he awakened, Radu remembered his dreams fondly. He had
dreamed of Twilight, and of his clan, and of the few days, the time he could
count in hours, that he and Laenea had spent together. It seemed as much
fantasy as the dreams themselves.

Then he was fully awake, and he remembered that his home was
far away and all his family dead of the plague that had only scarred him; he
remembered that he and Laenea were now and forever beyond each other’s
reach.

Sometimes, coming out of transit, Radu woke before the lid of
his sleep chamber unlatched, but this time it was already ajar. He pushed it up
as he rose.

Someone touched his arm.

Radu started violently.

“I beg your pardon,” the pilot beside him said
quizzically. He was small and frail looking, with very fine black hair and very
pale translucent skin. Radu remembered having seen his picture, and of course
he knew Vasili Nikolaievich by reputation. He was the first person ever to
become a pilot without having served on the crew. And he was a very good pilot.

“You — startled me,” Radu said. He would
have been startled to meet Vasili Nikolaievich at all, much less to find him,
unannounced, on a ship that was supposed to be automated. The administrators
generally sent Vasili on important flights that required fast round trips:
diplomatic missions, or emergencies. “I didn’t expect a pilot, and
I’m usually the first to wake up.”

“You are this time, too, but I thought you might need
help.” Unlike every other pilot Radu had ever seen, he wore his shirt
buttoned high, covering all but the tip of the pilot’s scar.

“This was supposed to be an automated ship,”
Radu said. He immediately regretted his churlish tone, but the last thing he
wanted to see right now was a pilot. He rubbed his face with both hands, as if
he could wipe away the last languor of transit sleep. “This
was
supposed to be an automated ship,” he said again. For any pilot to be
reassigned so late was unusual; for
this
pilot to be sent hinted at
extraordinary circumstances. “What happened? Were we diverted? Is this an
emergency flight?”

“I don’t know,” the pilot said.
“Nobody said it was.”

“Didn’t you ask?” Radu glanced at the
other sleep chambers, but only the two cradling his fellow crew members were in
use. The ship carried no passengers, no medical people.

“No,” the pilot said.

“Do we have medicine in the cargo? Hospital
equipment?”

“We don’t have any cargo at all,” the
pilot said. “They switched the full module for an empty one.”

“But why?”

“I told you. I don’t know. To tell you the
truth, I don’t much care.” He scowled. “My bid was up for
exploration when the administrators ordered me onto this milk run, and there
isn’t another x-team mission scheduled for six months.”

“Perhaps this isn’t a milk run,” Radu
said.

“Compared to an x team?” Vasili’s laugh
was sarcastic. “Look, I only came in here because I thought you might
need a hand. The crew usually does after a long trip. But you don’t, do
you?”

Radu’s momentary flash of excitement and anticipation
subsided. He felt he owed someone, somewhere, the same kind of risk that Laenea
and the others had taken to come to Twilight. But this trip was like all the
others, neither danger nor heroic rescue, merely the transportation of
frivolous goods for the profit of the transit administrators.

“No, I need no help,” he said to the pilot, and,
after too long a pause, “thank you.” He sat down to put on his
boots, and pretended to be concerned with a worn place on his right sock. His
hands were shaking, not because he had been startled or because he had thought,
if only for a moment, that he was by chance on an important or dangerous
mission. He was trembling because the pilot was so near. His heart beat faster.
He tried to control his pulse. He knew that his discomfort would continue as
long as Vasili Nikolaievich stayed beside him.

Despite the danger, his adverse reaction to Laenea had until
now caused him only grief, not fear. But if their intimacy had sensitized him
to the presence of
any
pilot, then he might eventually have to quit the
crew. That did frighten him.

The silence lengthened. Radu did not look up. The pilot
turned away and left the box room.

Radu released the breath he had unconsciously been holding.
He heard the pilot continue on into the crew lounge, to the passageway beyond,
and to the pilot’s cabin. The door opened, and closed solidly.

Ignoring his worn sock, Radu pulled on his boots and stood
up. His heartbeat slowed to a more normal rate. He wiped his forehead on his
sleeve. He had never heard of a crew member who responded to a pilot the way he
did. But, then, the pilots never spoke of their incompatibility with other
human beings, either. They simply kept to themselves. Maybe that prevented
ordinary people from reacting to them.

Radu checked the other body boxes. Neither Atna nor Orca had
yet reached a state approaching consciousness, so he left them alone. He walked
quietly through the lounge and past the pilot’s cabin, to the control
room beyond.

At the sight of the viewport he stopped, astonished.

An emerald green, cloud-wisped world hung just above them.
The ship had surfaced out of transit with accuracy impossible for an automated
ship and unusual for a piloted one. Most ships returned to normal space in more
or less the correct region, too close for another dive but far enough away that
the crew had to travel in real time at subluminal speeds, for a week, or a
month, unable to escape the boredom even with transit drugs. They were too
toxic for any use but sleeping through transit.

Sometimes a ship surfaced so far off its course that it had
to dive again. And sometimes the ships went so far astray that no one on board
could figure out where they were, and so they were lost. At least that was what
everyone assumed happened to lost ships; there was no real evidence that they
did not remain in transit forever, and some theoretical evidence that they did.

Radu glanced again at the bright world above, impressed
despite himself by the pilot’s skill. Vasili Nikolaievich’s
reputation was well earned.

Curious about the changes in the flight, Radu requested the
ship’s log. The main computer responded immediately; Vasili had already
awakened it from transit mode.

Not only had they given up their cargo and acquired a pilot,
but even their destination was new: Ngthummulun. Radu might as well not have
bothered to look it up: He had no idea how to pronounce it. He frowned. The
word was so strange to him that for an instant he suspected the ship had been
diverted to an alien rather than a human planet. In quarantine before his first
visit to earth, he had received the null-strain bacteria that prevented
cross-ecosystem contamination. But Radu needed more experience before the
administrators would approve him for alien-contact training. And in addition to
training, he lacked the proper immunizations. If Ngthummulun were an alien-inhabited
world, the first he had ever encountered, he would be forbidden to land.

The précis dispelled his moment’s disappointment.
Ngthummulun’s colonists were human, from Australia, on earth. Radu
thought he could probably even pronounce the original name.

The schedule showed a brief stopover here and a direct route
back to earth. The bonus offered for a fast trip was so large that it easily
explained the last minute changes as well as Vasili’s reassignment. The
crew’s bonus, which was generous enough to surprise Radu, would be only a
fraction of the amount the transit authority collected for itself.
Nevertheless, Radu did not want to go back to earth. He could return without
landing, of course he could sign onto another ship immediately. But this unexpected
change in his ship’s course made his abrupt departure nothing more than
foolish.

Radu cursed softly. He had too little seniority even to
complain, as if a complaint after the fact would do him any good at all.

The potential profit caused the diversion, that was clear.
But the log neglected to mention what cargo or what mission was worth the extra
cost.

Radu verified their destination and for practice checked for
a better orbit. He knew that the pilot would already have changed whatever
needed changing. Piloting, like mathematics, was an art as well as a science.
Radu had never tried to fool himself about his own mathematical talents. He saw
what anyone saw, he handled the factors anyone could handle. Going beyond, into
mathematical originality and intuition, was not something he was capable of
doing. He was good crew, but in more ways than one he was not, and never would
be, a pilot.

He returned to the lounge. It was a comfortable sitting
room, one wall all tiers of plants, the other walls bright colors. Without
checking — though he looked at the sensors anyway, out of habit —
Radu could tell that the environmental controls were working properly. However
efficient the air circulation, a slightly higher concentration of oxygen always
lingered around the plant banks. He gave the ferny leaves a spray of water,
then started a pot of coffee. He had drawn cooking duty, of course, as usual,
but he enjoyed it and never understood why it was assigned by default.

He looked through the stores, which were adequate if unexciting.
If their return were as accurate as their arrival, Radu would have only a few
meals to prepare, and he would be able to use fresh food for all of them.

Only the pilot had registered dislikes and allergies. Vasili
Nikolaievich had a long list of things he would not eat. That would restrict
meals to blandness, unless Radu fixed two versions of everything.