Superluminal (17 page)

However ordinary transit felt to Radu, it was profoundly
unknown, and he was in danger. He could do nothing; he could not even reassure
himself. He could only wait, without knowing how long the wait would be.

So he waited, drenched in slow cold sweat, staring out the
porthole at the infinite blank grayness. Once in a while he thought he saw a
flash of color outside, but the flashes were always at the edge of his vision,
and disappeared before he could look at them directly. He decided they must be
his imagination.

Hugging his knees to his chest, he put his head down.
Comforted by darkness, he waited.

o0o

Time passed. His mind counted it as hours, but tension made
it feel like days. When he nearly dozed, he jerked awake, afraid. Why should he
be afraid to sleep? He felt groggy, and the fragments of a dream swirled around
him — he heard Laenea’s voice — and vanished. He shook his
head, stood, and paced across the crew lounge and back again.

He went down the hall and flung open the door to the control
room.

At the console, the pilot stared out the sweeping forward
port. The sound of the door disturbed him, or he saw Radu’s reflection
distorted in the glass. He spun toward him with a cry. Vasili
Nikolaievich’s horror gradually changed to shock. After a moment he
exhaled sharply, fumbled for his breathing mask, and fitted it over his mouth
and nose. He drew in pure oxygen from the tank slung over his shoulder. When he
took the mask away he had composed himself.

“Do you know where we are?” Radu asked.
“Are we still lost?”

The pilot gazed at him; he blinked once, exhaled again, took
another breath, and answered. The faint tremor in his voice betrayed his
apparent calm.

“I know where we are,” he said.
“I’ve found the way.”

“How much longer do we have to stay in transit?”

Vasili breathed deeply from his mask. “I tried to
explain that the question isn’t answerable, we’ve got about the
same distance still to go as we’ve already been, but that doesn’t
mean the time will seem the same.” He spoke all in one breath, then put the
mask back to his face. Breathing was the last normal rhythm pilots gave up in
order to survive transit: They took irregular gulps of pure oxygen and exhaled
only when the carbon dioxide level in their blood began to interfere with the
exchange of oxygen.

“Something would have happened by now if it were going
to, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so,” the pilot said, “at least I
think so, I’m sorry to keep saying this but I don’t know because we
haven’t got any clear idea how things happen to normal people in transit.”
He paused for breath. “The ones who were still alive couldn’t
describe the sequences, and something that looks solid and sensible in transit
will be something even a pilot can’t explain afterwards, you’ll
see…” He ran out of breath and returned to his mask.

“I don’t feel any different,” Radu said,
then realized what Vasili had been trying to avoid saying. “You mean
there’s no way to tell if something will happen to me until we leave
transit.”

The pilot kept the mask to his face much longer than necessary.
Finally he took it away. He stretched his free hand toward Radu, as if in
supplication. “I’m no expert, I haven’t studied what happened
in the early days, besides, nothing happened to you the times you woke
up.”

Radu slumped down in the other seat, resigned to more
uncertainty. The pilot glanced briefly over the instruments and immediately
returned his attention to the blank gray port. He breathed occasionally from
the mask, but so seldom that he obviously did it only in response to real need.

Radu watched the digital numbers on the clock flick by, less
evenly than the seconds ticked past in his mind. He tried to compare them for
reference. After a while he shook his head in irritation. Something peculiar
was going on, but he could not figure out what it was because he had forgotten
what the clock had said when he first started watching it. That had nothing to
do with the vagaries of transit: He was too distracted to be able to
concentrate.

“Now that you’ve seen it,” Vasili said,
“what do you think of it?”

“I beg your pardon? Think of what?”

“Transit!”

Radu frowned. “I think it’s excessively dull.
But if you want to invent mysteries about it, I won’t tell the
secret.”

The pilot’s expression was nearly as surprised as when
Radu appeared awake and alive and unchanged.

“You mean you don’t see it — you
don’t feel it?”

“See what? Feel what?”

The pilot flung out his arms, pointing to the viewport.
“See that — and feel… its presence, all around you, palpable,
it’s indescribable, it’s different for everyone.”

“But there’s nothing there,” Radu said.

Vasili Nikolaievich did not reply for a moment. Then,
“What did you say?”

“There’s nothing there. A blank gray fog. No
space, no stars. Just nothing.”

“You see nothing?”

“Are you trying to make a fool of me? Shall I put my
fantasies up there for your entertainment?” Radu spoke in anger. His
fantasies were too painful even for him.

“What are you?” the pilot whispered. “Are
you some disguised machine, are you being tested, am I?”

“What?” Radu almost laughed, but the pilot was
deadly serious, and frightened. “I’m a human being, just like
you.” He stretched out his arm, and his sleeve hiked up above the bandage
on his wrist. “Pilot, you’ve seen me bleed.”

The pilot shrugged. “Easy enough to
counterfeit.”

“This is ridiculous,” Radu said.
“Intelligent machines don’t function properly in transit. Everyone
knows that.”

“Nor do ordinary human beings.”

“If they invented such a machine there’d be no
reason to keep it secret.”

“Pilots would be obsolete — we may be anyway,
because of you, no matter what you are, despite all the effort that’s
gone into making us… acceptable.”

“This conversation makes no sense, pilot,” Radu
said. He could think of no gentler way to put it. “If someone went to all
the trouble of making a human machine this would be a purely idiotic way to
test it. And if someone made a human machine they’d choose a better face
than mine to put it behind.”

The pilot’s tension eased slightly.
“That’s true,” he said with childlike cruelty, “that
last, at least, is true, but machine or not, you’re immune to transit
— you’re oblivious to it! — and whatever you are, you make
pilots redundant.”

“I’m no pilot,” Radu said. “I
haven’t the ability or the skills. And I haven’t the desire.
I’m no threat to you.”

Facing the blank window, the pilot took a deep, slow breath.
“Maybe you really believe that,” he said, his back to Radu so his
voice sounded remote, “or wish you did, but you’re wrong.”

Radu folded his arms, glowering. “Or you could be
wrong,” he said sarcastically. “I still could die.”

“No,” the pilot said softly, “it will be a
long time before your bones go to dust, you’ll live… unless I kill
you myself.”

Astonished, Radu made no response.

“Go away,” the pilot said, “please go
away.”

Radu left the control room, though the tortured plea asked
far more of him than that.

Pilots had the reputation of being not completely stable.
Radu had never paid the idea much attention. He did not know why talented
people often fostered rumors of madness; truly insane people were unpleasant to
be around. The only pilot Radu knew at all closely was Laenea Trevelyan, and
she was exceptionally sane. Vasili was a bit eccentric, surely, but —
mad? Radu tried to dismiss the pilot’s threat to kill him. No one had
ever threatened him before. Back on Twilight, people lucky enough to escape the
plague had resented him for contracting it and recovering. He was marked by his
scars, and some people hated him for living while their own families died. But
even in grief and fury, no one back home had ever threatened his life.

The suicide pills remained on the table in the crew lounge.
Radu picked up the vial, threw it down the disposal, and tried to persuade
himself that he was not afraid of the pilot.

o0o

As Vasili Nikolaievich predicted, when the ship surfaced
from transit, Radu did not die. He did not even notice the transition. He was
sitting in the lounge, bored and tired but still unwilling to allow himself to
sleep. For no good reason he was afraid to give up his consciousness, however
naturally.

Once in a while he glanced at the port, but the dead gray
expanse, never mysterious, grew tedious. He began to ignore it; he began
deliberately to avoid looking at it. But when he nearly fell asleep and roused
himself, startled and disoriented and searching wildly for the fragments of
another dissolving dream, he stared around the room and his gaze stopped at the
port. Space had returned, normal space and a pattern of widely scattered stars.
Earth, very close, blue and white and brown, loomed lazily above.

The door opened behind him. Radu faced Vasili Nikolaievich,
who nodded once without smiling. As he turned away, Radu took a step forward.

“I want to call Laenea,” he said.

“You can’t.”

“You have no right —”

“You can’t, because she’s out on her first
transit flight.” Vasili Nikolaievich closed himself into the control room
alone.

The tension Radu had been under for so long drained slowly
away. Between exhaustion, hunger, and the three different sleep drugs he had
taken, he felt shaky and nauseated. His slashed wrist ached fiercely.

He wished his dreams of Laenea in distress would fade away
and vanish in the way of most dreams, but this they refused to do. Nothing
would make him feel easy about her safety until she returned and he could speak
to her. His nightmares, the hallucinations he remembered from Twilight, and
Atna’s vision all twisted together, mixing reality and fantasy.
Atna’s premonition of danger had too many connections to everything that
had happened for Radu to be able to dismiss it so easily anymore.

He felt trapped and uncertain, helpless to confront
important matters, yet confronted by the trivial chores of preparing the ship
for its return to Earthstation. He cursed, and got to work.

As the other chamber cycled Orca back toward life, Radu
returned resentfully to his own body box and cleaned up after himself where he
had retched. In the bathroom he washed his hands and splashed cold water on his
face.

Did you expect the pilot to wipe up your vomit? he asked
himself sarcastically.

As he prepared a quick breakfast — they would not have
time for anything more — he drank a mug of coffee, wondering if the
caffeine would make him sick. But it helped.

When he heard Orca trying to get up, he hurried to her side
and helped her out. Her fingers were cold, the translucent swimming webs nearly
colorless. He hugged her, stroking her neck, rubbing her sides and back to warm
her. She shivered violently.

“Damn,” she said. Her teeth chattered. She
hugged Radu tightly, leaning her forehead against his chest. “I feel awful.”

“It’s all right. We’re only two hours out
from earth.”

He held her until her shivering subsided.

Orca laughed shakily. “Thanks. I’m okay
now.” She drew away from him, embarrassed. “I never reacted like
that before.”

Radu kept on lightly stroking her arms, for she did not look
fully recovered.

“Did something happen?” she asked. “Do you
feel any different than usual?”

“No,” he said automatically, then, trying to
take back the lie, “well, yes. It was more uncomfortable to wake up this
time.” That, at least, was an accurate statement. He wanted to tell her
the truth, but he was afraid to. He did not want to see the same look in her
eyes that he had seen in the pilot’s.

“I’m glad Atna stayed home,” Orca said.
“That was a hard dive. I don’t know what it would have done to him.
I think he was right to be afraid.”

“Yes,” Radu said slowly, reluctantly.
“Yes. His vision was correct.”

Orca went below to check out the transit engines and prepare
the ship for refueling. Radu tuned in a data signal from Earthstation, then,
without waiting for the information to arrive, reset the clocks in the lounge.
He had been reprimanded once for doing a reset before checking local time. The
senior crew member had not bothered to notice that his reset was accurate. The
record of a data signal contact saved trouble.

The ship had been out six weeks earth subjective time. It
would dock well within the deadline for the bonus. Vasili might even be able to
rejoin his exploration team.

Now that he had a moment to himself in the control room,
Radu tried to call Laenea, hoping she had returned since Vasili asked about
her. But her ship was still out. As far as he could tell, it was an even bet
whether he or Laenea had been awake in transit first.

He hoped she had found it more interesting than he had.

She had been gone for quite a while. Radu wondered just how
long training flights were meant to be. He tried to put off his worry by
reminding himself that time in transit, at superluminal speeds, had no
correlation with time in Einsteinian space, where all travel was slower than
the speed of light. Against the six weeks that had passed on earth, Radu
counted that the normal space segment of the trip to Ngthummulun had taken less
than forty-eight hours, and he had been awake in transit barely a day.

Radu watered and fed the life-support system. Both the
instruments and his own senses indicated that the catalyzed photosynthesis was
performing with efficiency.

“What do you plan to do?”

Radu started at Vasili’s sudden appearance.

“I don’t know,” Radu said.
“I’d planned to find another automated ship and go back out again,
but —”

“You can’t fly on an automated ship anymore.
You’ll blast it out of transit every time.”