Superluminal (22 page)

“It’s just that you’re so small,”
Radu said. “Back home…” He hoped he could say what he meant
well enough not to offend her again. “Ever since I left home, I’ve
been surrounded by people who seemed fragile to me. I feel as if I could hurt
them without meaning to. I felt awkward around Vasili Nikolaievich, and when I
helped Atna awaken, I could have been holding a songbird in my hands, his bones
seemed so frail.” Radu did not mention Laenea: He had never felt that she
was frail, but she was unique in his mind anyway.

“I’m third generation diver,” Orca said.
“That’s hardly enough time for us to get decadent.”

Radu rubbed the stinging marks on his arm. “I
won’t forget again.”

She touched him, gently this time. “Sorry,” she
said. “Come with me for a way.”

She entered the elevator; Radu got in after her. They rose
to the surface and left the blockhouse. Orca faced the night’s sea wind
and breathed deeply. Beneath the hint of fuel and ozone lay the salt spray of
half a world of ocean. Without waiting to see if he came with her, she walked
along the edge of the platform for several hundred meters. Radu hesitated, then
followed, and they walked together in silence. It was very late, very quiet;
the brilliant spotlights fell behind and darkness enfolded and isolated them.

At the edge of the landing platform, Orca put her fingers to
her lips and whistled, a piercing, carrying, complex burst of sound. She tilted
her head, as if listening, and then she looked out serenely over the gentle
swells. Radu saw nothing in the dark waves, and all he could hear was the soft
splash of water against the port’s side.

Orca faced him, serious and intense.

“When you want it, I offer my help, and that of my
family. Come to Victoria, to the harbor, and ask after us. We aren’t hard
to find unless we wish to be.”

“Thank you,” Radu said again.

Orca unfastened her spangled jacket, let it slide from her
shoulders, and stripped off her net shirt. She unzipped her pants, let them
fall from her narrow hips, and kicked them off along with her red shoes. Her
skin gleamed in the moonlight as she paused on the edge of the dock.

“What are you doing?”

“Going home.”

“You’re going to swim? All the way? Won’t
you freeze? What about your clothes?” Now that she was actually leaving,
Radu found himself gripped by a feeling of loneliness as sudden as it was
unexpected, unwanted, and inexplicable.

“Everything I wanted to keep, I left in my bag. My
clothes will get to crew quarters, or they won’t. It doesn’t
matter.”

“I’ll take them.” He bent and picked them
up.

Instead of replying, Orca pointed out at the sea.

The black dorsal fin of a huge animal cut the surface and
vanished. A few seconds later the creature breached the water in a spectacular
leap. White patches on its side shone like snow. The graceful bulk sliced the
water noiselessly coming down, but at the last instant the creature slapped its
tail on the water. Droplets spattered Radu’s cheek.

Orca laughed. “She’s playing.”

“What is it?”

“My name-cousin. Orca. The killer whale. She’s
come to meet me.” The diver’s voice sounded far away, as if she
were already swimming naked and joyous in the frigid mysterious sea.
“She’s come to take me home.”

“Good-bye, Orca,” Radu said.

She did not answer, and she did not hug him good-bye. She
was no longer crew, but a diver. She drew back her arms, and, as she launched
herself off the platform, flung them forward. Her long, flat dive curved down
from the high deck, and she entered the water between two swells, without a
splash.

Radu watched for her to surface, but saw neither Orca nor
her name-cousin again.

He searched for them for several minutes, then finally,
turned away from the sea. If he was to follow Marc’s advice, which seemed
very sound to him, he had just enough time to catch the early morning ferry to
the mainland. He looked forward to getting away from huge metal constructions,
to breathing fresh air, to watching the sun rise over a dark line of distant
mountains. He wondered how fast Orca and her name-cousin traveled, and whether
the ferry might sail past them; would they swim underwater all the way? He did
not know if Orca could breathe water, or if she had to surface for air. But
perhaps, at dawn, he might stand on the deck and see her swimming with her
friend on the bright horizon.

Water slapped gently against the side of the port. The lights
of the ferry dock made dim, distant stars in the fog. Radu walked along the
edge of the platform. The darkness and the quiet reminded him of home, and of
the two years he had spent all alone in the mountains. There he had been alone
without feeling loneliness. Loneliness was much more powerful in the midst of
many people.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he thought angrily. Orca
offered you help, and friendship, and you turned her down.

Still, he wished he could dive out into the mist, into the
black and soothing sea, and swim through the solitude and silence all the way
to the mainland.

He knew better. Whatever permitted Orca to swim long
distances in this climate and temperature, Radu lacked. In the frigid water he
would last a few minutes, a half hour with great luck. After that he would
lapse into hypothermia, and then unconsciousness, and then he would die.

Shadows startled him. He turned, and saw nothing.

Or course you saw nothing, he thought. Nothing’s
there. Why are you letting shadows scare you? If you’d behaved like this
back home, you would have driven yourself crazy before a season was out.

But he could not help glancing once again toward the
imagined movement.

Like a ghost, Vasili Nikolaievich appeared, only his pale
face visible in the darkness. Radu gasped involuntarily. The shadows behind the
pilot moved: Scattered light glinted off a long lock of blond hair here, a dark
face there, a gray wolf-stone, glowing like an animals’ eye. The fog
draped itself around them.

“This time you’d better come with us,”
Vasili said.

Radu took one step forward. “Leave me alone,” he
whispered. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“Please don’t argue. Everything’s been
decided.”

“Not by me!”

“I told you before, you haven’t anything to say
about it.”

Radu panicked. He flung himself around and fled. But there
was nowhere he could go, with the pilots spreading out into a semicircle around
him, capturing him against the edge of the port. He glanced over his shoulder.
They were coming after him, getting closer with each step. He pushed himself
harder, panting with exhaustion. Being away from home was making him soft.

Suddenly, in front of him, two more pilots appeared.

Skidding on the damp deck, he stopped. He turned slowly. The
blurry, backlit shapes of the pilots were all around him. When he stopped
again, he faced the sea.

Radu plunged headfirst off the platform.

He would swim to the ferry ramp, he would climb up it, he
would make enough noise to attract the attention of someone besides the pilots
—

He hit the water.

The cold knocked the breath out of him. He floundered to the
surface, cold salt water in his mouth and nose. He sputtered and coughed and
struggled against the return of panic. Above, the pilots argued. The fog hid
them and blotted out all but the tones of their voices. They did not shoot at
him, if they had weapons, and none followed him into the sea.

The salt stung the cut on his wrist until, in a moment, the
cold numbed his hands.

Twilight’s icy mountain lakes held a touch of the
world’s warmth, but this ocean promised only inconceivable depths of
freezing, lightless water.

Radu paddled laboriously along the edge of the port. If he
just kept going he would be all right. Each high swell slapped him in the face
with harsh salt spray. His clothes weighted him down. He tried to kick off his
boots. He failed. Shivering uncontrollably, he started swimming. He lost his
grip on Orca’s clothes. They drifted away. He lunged for them and grabbed
them. Somehow it seemed very important to keep hold of them. Orca’s
jacket twisted around his arm.

His only hope was to reach the ramp before he passed out.
The distance, which had seemed so short when he was running, stretched on
interminably. A trick of perspective, he thought, his mind winding around the
words, then losing the sense of them. A wave, rebounding from the side of the
port, curled over him. He reached for the surface: He thought he knew where it
was, but he stretched his arms into water like black ice, and his struggles got
him no closer to the air.

A huge dark shape appeared below him. The sight of it
pierced through the cold. He remembered what he had read of earth and its
predators, and what Orca had said of sharks when she showed him her claws.
Terrified, he flailed upward and broke the surface. He tried to catch his
breath; he tried to call for help. He tried to swim harder toward the ferry
ramp, but the current carried him farther and farther from the port.

The creature rose under him and he felt the turbulence of
its motion. He expected slashing pain, teeth through flesh, hot blood gushing
through severed arteries and veins. But he felt nothing, except the black shape
pushing him. He was beyond pain, beyond panic, beyond fear. Calm settled over
him. When the creature attacked, he would not feel it. He would not feel
anything anymore. Radu lost consciousness.

Radu struggled with another nightmare. Laenea was on
Twilight, a member of the crew of the emergency ship. The crew, rather than
remaining safely in their orbiting ship, had landed with the medical team. They
had arrived just as Radu had begun to feel, and deny, high fever and mental
dissociation, the plague’s first symptoms. That was the reality. But in
the nightmare it was Laenea who grew ill, and instead of her caring for him, he
cared for her. He was afraid she would die like the others, friends and family,
whom he had known would become ill but had no way to save. In the reality of
the past, Laenea had saved his life. In the past of his nightmare, he saw that
Laenea was dying, but refused to accept that result.

He woke. His dream, as dreams will, began to dissolve to
nothingness.

He pushed at the lid of his body box. His hand encountered
rough wood. In a moment of pure terror and resurging memory he jammed his hands
up against the planks. He had been dying of the cold, he had been attacked by a
creature. He had been taken for dead and no one had read his will. Instead of
burning him and sending his ashes home, they had boxed him up and put him in
the ground. A recurrent nightmare was coming true.

After the plague he dreamed over and over and over again
that he had been buried along with the rest of his family and most of his
friends. In the peculiar multiple time flow of the dreaming state, he saw
himself as gravedigger for himself just as he had been gravedigger in dreams
and in reality for his mother and for his other parents, for his sisters and
brothers, one after another till he was alone. In his dreams they, and he,
struggled to get out of the coffin, to throw off the thickening cover of soil,
and to return to life.

I’ll never save them now, he thought. Not them, or
Laenea —

The lid stayed solid above him and he flung his hands apart,
searching for some weakness in his prison. One hand hit a wall, but the other
clutched only air, and the combined motions made him lurch sideways.

He fell out of bed.

The air was fresh and the echoes those of a room. So many
levels of dream and nightmare, memory and reality, swept around him that he
wondered if he had gone mad.

The lights flicked on, bright enough to dazzle him. A vague
shape jumped down beside him.

“Radu, are you all right?”

He recognized Orca’s voice. His eyes reaccustomed
themselves to light. Orca sat on her heels before him, watching him anxiously.

Radu pushed himself up and looked around. Books lined two
walls; the built-in bunk beds lent the cabin a nautical look. But the
underwater porthole over the desk, and the chamber’s dimensions and floor
plan, revealed it to be one of the ocean spaceport’s sleeping rooms.

“What happened?”

“I had a nightmare, and I remembered one I thought I
was having again,” he said. “I’m awake now.” He tried
to stand, but could not gather the strength. “I thought…” He
glanced down. His legs were unwounded, unscarred.

Orca nodded toward the porthole. In the light that dissolved
through the glass into the sea, the black-and-white form of Orca’s friend
the killer whale glided by. Radu shivered.

“My cousin heard you,” Orca said. “We
hadn’t gone very far, we were playing. When she heard you dive she
thought you might be one of us, but neither of us recognized the swimming
patterns. Then you started moving like you were in trouble, so we came
back.”

“I’m very grateful that you did.”

She shrugged, then scowled. “Did they
push
you
in?”

“No,” he said. “They followed me. They
wanted me to come with them, but… I declined. I don’t think they
intended to drive me into the water. It’s only that they scared me, and I
panicked.”

“‘Only’ scared you? Like the other
time?” Orca said angrily. “They weren’t even trying to help
you — and by the time I got you out of the water they’d just
disappeared.”

“Where are they now?”

“Some of them are waiting for you. They can’t
come into the divers’ section without an invitation. But they’re
waiting outside.”

“I’ve made a very bad mistake,” Radu said.
“I’ve put you in danger but left you in ignorance. I can try to
correct that, if you still want me to.”

She helped him back into his bunk, pulled a blanket around
him, and sat crosslegged nearby.