Superluminal (19 page)

“We’re not the only people in the water,”
she said, “and sometimes the landers get into trouble. Good gods, who
cares? Lie down.” She started away.

Radu’s laughter trailed off, but he pushed himself up
and tried to stand. Orca’s spangled jacket slipped from his shoulders
where she had thrown it. His fingers felt numb; he had to concentrate to make
them grasp it. Orca heard him, stopped, and turned back. He held her jacket out
to her.

Watching him, worried, she took it and absently slipped on.
She glanced down. There was a run in her sleeveless knitted shirt, where the
gold thread had parted and the fabric unraveled in a line up her ribs and the
side of her small breast. She jerked the front edges of the jacket together,
hiding the flaw in irritation.

“You’re all right?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I react badly to pilots. I don’t understand
why. I think it’s getting worse.”

“Did they know? Did they do it deliberately?”

“I guess they did.” He had, after all, told
Vasili Nikolaievich.

“What did they want?”

“They wanted… to convince me not to tell anyone
what they want.”

She scowled at him. “All right. Forget it.” She
turned and started away. He tried to follow, but stumbled and nearly fell. She
caught him and slipped his arm over her shoulders to let him lean on her.
“Come on.”

Radu would not have gotten very far without her. She helped
him along to the station’s section of small crew rooms. Finding an empty
cubicle, she unlatched the door, got him inside, and eased him down on the
narrow bed.

“Want your boots off?”

“I can do it.” He bent his knee, drawing one
foot toward his hands as he lay flat on the hard mattress. He did not feel as
if he could sit up again.

“Don’t be stupid.” Orca grasped his boot
and pulled.

“Be careful of your hands —”

Orca gave the boot a solid jerk and it slid off. She dropped
it and held up her hand, spreading her fingers so the translucent webbing
showed.

“I know it looks fragile,” she said. “But
it isn’t. It’s very tough.” Then she showed him a long,
jagged scar between the second and third fingers of her left hand. “And
it heals fast when something does happen.” She grabbed his other boot and
pulled it off. “Besides, it doesn’t make that much difference
swimming.”

“Then why do you have it?” he asked, surprised.

“Because when people thought about what divers would
be like, even before anybody could create us, they always imagined us looking
like this. So that’s how they designed us. We decided to stay this
way.”

“Are your feet like that too?” Radu never would
have asked such a question if he were not so tired. He blushed.
“I’m sorry —”

“I have foldover toes, like a platypus,” she
said. “With webs between.” Then she grinned. “No, my feet are
pretty much the same as anybody’s, except for the nails. Want to
see?”

He nodded, curious, and glad she was not offended by his
prying.

“There’s nothing secret about being a diver, you
know.” She sat on the edge of his bed, pulled off her red canvas shoes,
and wiggled her toes. They were long, but not abnormally so, and they were not
appreciably webbed.

Radu pushed himself up on one elbow and took her foot in his
other hand. Her toenails were like claws, cat claws, tiger claws, retractable
and heavy and quit sharp. Orca flexed her foot and the claws extended. One
dimpled the flesh of his hand, very gently.

“Good protection,” she said. “You need it
sometimes, in the sea. They aren’t much against sharks, but then there
aren’t many dangerous sharks where I live.” She retracted her claws
and reached for her shoes.

Radu lay back on the bed as she stood up.

“Do you think they’ll come after you
again?” she asked abruptly.

Radu shook his head. “I don’t know.” His
reasoning was none too clear right now; he did not want to think about pilots.
He could not. Surrounded by normal space-time, he wanted only to sleep.

Orca stood gazing at the closed door, silhouetted against
its dirty white surface. She shrugged, an action more like shaking off doubt
than expressing it, and put her hand up against the panel to seal the room
against outside intrusion. She turned around.

“I’m not so recently out of the water that I
think this is a clever line. But I don’t want to leave you alone tonight,
and to tell you the truth I’m not anxious to be alone myself. Do you mind
if I stay?”

“No,” Radu said. “Of course not.”

She kicked off her shoes again and dropped her spangled
jacket on the floor. “Is there room? Not that there’s much
difference between floors and beds in these places.”

“There’s plenty of room.” Radu moved over
and Orca lay down beside him, between him and the door. He was as glad of her
company as he was grateful for her concern.

She smelled like no one he had ever been close to before,
cool and salty, like the sea’s morning mist. He wondered if he smelled,
to her, like forest or earth or alien ground.

“Lights out, please,” Radu said. The lights
obeyed, leaving the room completely dark.

Radu lay in the narrow bed for nearly an hour, unable to
rest, trying not to toss and turn.

“You can’t sleep,” Orca said softly.

“No. How did you know? Did I wake you?”

“I can see you,” Orca said.

“It’s pitch dark in here,” Radu said. That
was one of the few things Radu did
not
like about being in space.
Interior rooms, rooms with no windows, were as lightless as caves. He turned
his head toward the sound of Orca’s voice, but he could see nothing of
her, not even the glint of her pale, fine hair. The scarlet pattern of the
blood vessels in his retinas flickered against blackness.

“For you it’s dark,” she said. “Not
for me. You don’t know much about divers, do you?”

“Only that they have foldover toes, like a
platypus,” he said. “With webs between.”

Orca chuckled and dug her claws gently into the heavy fabric
of his pants. He heard the quick pricking sound, but her talons never touched
his skin.

“No,” he said, more seriously. “I only
know what you’ve told me.”

“We see farther into the infrared, and farther into
the violet, than humans do.”

“Don’t you consider yourself still human?”

“My father would say no,” she said.

“What would you say?”

She hesitated. “I’d say we were more different
than a race, but less different than a separate species. We’re a
transition phase.”

“A transition to what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and to Radu she
sounded very sad.

“What’s the matter?” He slid his hand up
her arm to her shoulder, to her throat, to her face. He touched her cheek in
the darkness and brushed the tears with his fingertips. “Orca,
what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know what we’re changing to.
I’m not sure I want to know.”

“But it’s all speculation, it’s all
generations away.”

“Not for us,” she said. “We didn’t
become divers by natural evolution. There’s no reason to slow down to
that rate now.”

“Oh.” Radu felt embarrassed by his own
ignorance. “Of course. Your next generation could be different.”

“Or I could.”

“You —?“

“That’s what the meeting’s about. To
decide if we should change. The techniques are easy enough. You figure out what
you want, build the DNA, construct a series of carrier viruses, sensitize
yourself to them —” Radu felt her shrug. “You feel like you
have the flu for a few days, while the virus replicates. Then you’re
well, the new genes are integrated, and they slowly change you to fit.”

Radu suddenly shuddered.

“Hey,” Orca said. “It’s not bad at
all, not really. The process itself is trivial. I’ve done it myself, a
couple of times. But just for little things. The big ones scare me, but they
won’t turn us into Frankenstein monsters.”

“Of course not, I’m sorry — I don’t
know why I reacted like that. Have you ever had an experience, and in the
middle of it suddenly felt you’d gone through it before, exactly as it
was happening?”

“Sure.
Déjà vu
, it’s called. It’s
just a trick your mind plays on you, like an echo. Crossed axons.”

“I suppose,” Radu said. “Whatever it was,
it made me understand why you feel wary of the changes you might have to
undergo.”

“I wouldn’t
have
to,” she said.
“It would be my choice. But if I didn’t, and everyone else
did…”

She stopped.

“You’d be left behind,” Radu said finally.
“Whatever it was your family was going to, you’d be left
behind.”

Orca nodded against his shoulder, then held him in silence
for some time.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she
said. Her voice was easy again, full of her usual good humor. “Tell me
about Twilight. What did you do before this, or did you join the crew straight
out of school?”

“We never formally go to school,” Radu said.
“But we never formally leave it, either. There aren’t enough people
on Twilight for many of us to spend all our time studying. So we do that, and
other things too. I liked geology, so I went on surveys every summer from the
time I was old enough to be more asset than liability, first with a group and
later by myself. Everybody does everything on Twilight, more or less. I helped
in my clan’s nursery, and built houses, and I piloted one of the blimps —”

Orca made a strange noise. “Something wrong?”

“A
blimp
?”

“Don’t you like blimps?”

“The only thing I like less than blimps is
boats.”

“But why?”

“Because with a boat you can’t see what’s
under you. It’s like driving a ground car down the road with your eyes
and ears covered.”

“That doesn’t explain why you don’t like
blimps.”

“You’ll laugh,” she said.

“That’s possible,” Radu said. “I
could use a good laugh right now.”

Orca chuckled again. “Get ready for one, then. I get
airsick. I get seasick even worse.”

Radu did laugh. Orca was not offended, because she laughed,
too.

“Most divers don’t like boats,” she said.
“You need a lot of equipment to find out things that you can learn
underwater by giving one good shout and listening carefully.”

“What about blimps?” Radu said.

“As far as I know,” she said, “I’m
the only person in the world who doesn’t like blimps.”

“The only person in several worlds, I think. I got to
fly ours for only one season because the waiting list to take it over was so
long.” Suddenly he yawned.

“Me, too,” Orca said.

Tentatively each put an arm around the other, and then they
slept.

o0o

Radu struggled up out of dreams that, instead of being
distinct and vivid, were jumbled and muddy, mixing Laenea and transit and
homesickness and fear. He sat bolt upright, staring in the darkness toward the
door, expecting it to open and reveal a line of pilots beyond.

He pushed the paranoid thought away, muttered for the
lights, and looked around the tiny windowless room. Orca was gone. He was
disappointed, and rather surprised, but he could hardly blame her.

Using the communications terminal in the room, he checked
the status of Laenea’s transit ship. It was still out. He frowned, and
rechecked, but the display gave no additional information. He shut it off.

Combing his hair with his fingers and shedding his clothes
behind him, he went into the minuscule bathroom.

No one on Twilight would have taken as long or as hot a
shower as he indulged in. He did not even feel guilty about it.

Earthstation has plenty of water, he thought. It has plenty
of power. I know that. But that isn’t why I’m standing here with
luxurious amounts of water running wasted between my toes. It’s because
I’m changing. I’m coming to expect what this life has to offer. And
I like it.

But he disliked that realization.

When Radu came out again, more relaxed but no closer than
before to knowing what he should do, Orca was sitting crosslegged on the
rumpled bed with breakfast spread out before her. Radu stepped back, reaching
for a towel.

“I’ve seen naked people before,” Orca
said. “We hardly ever even wear clothes at home. Come and eat.”

He wrapped himself up in the towel before he came out.

“I thought you’d left,” he said.

“I did. But I came back.”

“I mean permanently.”

She stopped smiling. “I thought about it.”

Radu sat on the edge of the bed. “It probably would
have been better if you had.”

Orca handed him a piece of fruit and began unwrapping
elegantly folded paper parcels.

“You’re determined not to accept any help,
aren’t you?”

Radu took a cautious bite of the round yellow-green fruit.
It was tart and sweet.

“This is very good,” he said. “What is
it?”

“An apple,” Orca said impatiently.

Radu took another bite, and started to comment again on the
taste, but Orca’s expression made him think better of any more
dissembling.

“I’m sorry you’ve been involved,” he
said. “If I knew anything you could do I’d accept your help gladly.
But the truth is I don’t understand what’s happened myself, or what
I can do about it.”

“Oh, come on. This is what you were arguing with Vaska
about, back on the ship, wasn’t it? As for that little production last
night — you were scared, gods know so was I, but you weren’t
surprised.”

“I’d be doing you an injury if I told you
everything,” Radu said. “I’d be putting you in considerable
danger.”

“Look, Radu, we’re crew. We don’t give
that up when we leave the ship.”

“It would be stupid to endanger you any more!”

She shrugged. “I’m in about as deep as I can be.
They’ll assume I know anything you know.”

Of course she was right. If the pilots saw him as a
sufficient threat, they would have to believe Orca was dangerous to them as
well. It would not be safe for them to leave her alone.