Superluminal (24 page)

I know, Orca replied. I want to touch you, I want to feel
the coldness of the sea at my back and the heat of your body against mine, but,
oh, my friend, I can’t come with you now.

You’re going away again, to unsounded regions.

Don’t worry about me, Orca said. The places I’ve
been haven’t harmed me, it’s only if I can’t go back that
I’ll be sad.

You are sad when you have to stay, her cousin said, and I am
sad when you have to go.

Go
, to the whales, was the same word as
disappear
,
which was in turn the same word as
die
. Her cousin did not mean
die
,
but the connotation of distress was unavoidable and unmistakable. The sea was a
medium in which another family, the gray whales, could sing a song one day and
by the next day hear its echo — echo was the nearest concept human speech
possessed, though what they and the other cetaceans and the divers heard was
the song’s direct sound wave, stretched and changed by its
circumnavigation of the globe.

In the sea, intelligent beings did not disappear from
hearing unless they died.

I know, Orca said. I know, and I’m sorry. I love you.

Her cousin slid past her, wanting her to come back into the
sea and play. Play, with the cousins, involved love-play and sex-play and
joy-play; the same sound sequence meant all those things.

Orca wished she could be playing with her cousin, gliding
around and through and between her songs.

I’m sorry, she said again. If I left now, it would be
like leaving a newborn underwater…

Her cousin made a sound of surprise, for accusing someone of
the ability to abandon a child to death by drowning was the worst insult one
could offer.

This acquaintance of yours is not newborn, cousin. Has he so
little sense that you must care for him?

If I don’t help him, he’ll be all alone.

There are others.

Yes. But he’ll only be with — Orca combined the
sound sketch of a pilot with the sound sketch of a shark. Even though the
result was very crude, in middle speech, a blood cousin would have understood.
But the name-cousins, having evolved in an environment where nothing threatened
them, found fear incomprehensible even in true speech. There was a word for it,
but it was made up as a courtesy to the divers, and it meant, to the whales, a
feeling their cousins had in response to potential experiences they preferred
to leave unrealized. Even that was difficult for the whales to understand, for
to them all potentiality was opportunity.

I’m sorry, Orca said. He’s part of my other
family. Do you understand?

No, her cousin replied. I don’t understand. But I
accept. Good-bye.

Good-bye.

Orca turned off the speaker and sprinted out the door. The
whole interchange had taken only a few moments; she hoped she still had time to
catch up to Radu.

The elevator doors were sliding closed. She jammed her hands
between them and forced them open again, then stepped calmly inside with Radu,
Vasili Nikolaievich, and another young pilot named Chase.

“What do
you
want?” Vaska said. She had
startled him, and now his surprise was turning to anger.

Orca shoved her hands into her pockets, hunching her
shoulders. She spoke to Vasili with irritation equal to his own. “Since
there isn’t any reason Radu should trust you half as far as he could
throw you, there isn’t any reason why he should go with you all
alone.”

“You aren’t needed.”

“I will be, soon enough,” Orca said. “No
matter how small a ship you take, you’ll need a crew of at least two to
run it, and on this flight you might have a little trouble finding
volunteers.”

“What flight?”

“That’s part of what you didn’t want to
talk about in the hall,” Radu said.

“Oh,” said Chase. “Then you’d better
wait till we’re more secure.”

Like the divers, the pilots owned a floor of the stabilizer
shaft. No one else was permitted inside who was not an invited and accompanied
guest. The isolation was not only for physical privacy; they guarded against
electronic invasion as well.

“Orca,” Chase said, “we’re shielded
for all modes of transmission. The feedback’s fairly severe. If you need
to communicate with anyone, it would be safer to go outside our
quarters.”

“I understand,” Orca said. “Thanks.”

Radu whispered to Orca, “What did she mean by
that?”

“About feedback? That was a tactful way of telling me
not to try to use my internal communicator unless I want my skull
exploded.”

“What!”

“It’s okay,” she said. “We
don’t like strangers coming into our quarters and making transmissions,
either.”

They followed Chase through several concentric rings of
chambers, deeper and deeper into pilots’ quarters.

o0o

In the center of the pilots’ deck, in a windowless
room, more pilots than Radu had ever seen before had gathered together. He
recognized several who had surrounded him on Earthstation, and many he had seen
in news reports, and Ramona-Teresa.

She stood up. Beneath her shirt’s red lace inset, a
triangle with its base at her collarbone and its point at her navel, her scar
was a vivid white slash.

“Well, Chase,” she said. “Well, Vaska. You
finally found him.” She looked drawn and tired.

“Found him!” Orca said. “You nearly killed
him twice!”

“Never mind, Orca,” Radu said.

“We didn’t mean to scare him, out on
deck,” Vasili said. “It was an accident.”

“We didn’t expect you to jump off the
side,” Chase said. “By the time we found a life ring that whale was
swimming you toward the ferry dock.”

“I was not anxious to be surrounded again.”

“No, I guess not,” Chase said. “I’m
sorry, I didn’t think of it that way.”

Ramona-Teresa sighed with exasperation.

“Well, I apologize to you, too, then,” Chase
said. “None of us is exactly trained for spying and kidnapping.”

“I realize that. Still, you might have handled this
more gracefully. And why did you bring the diver here?”

“We didn’t bring either of them,” Chase said.
“They brought us.”

“Orca thinks she’s his bodyguard,” Vasili
said sarcastically.

Radu felt Orca tense with anger; he curled his fingers
around hers, but he doubted he could restrain her if she chose to free herself.

“As she’s already saved my life twice in
encounters with pilots,” he said, “I’m extremely grateful to
her for offering to come with me.”

“Radu Dracul,” Ramona said, speaking so slowly
and distinctly that it was clear she would not put up with another interruption
or change of subject. “It’s true I… invited you to come to
speak with us. But that was last night. Now is a bad time. A ship is lost —”

“I know. That’s why I’m here. To ask you
to help me find Laenea.”

After the uproar — some of it laughter — died
down, and Radu explained what he believed had happened to him in transit, he
had to endure an hour of skepticism, questioning, and speculations. He kept his
back to a wall, and the pilots stayed farther from him than when they had been
trying to frighten him. They discomforted him, but the discomfort was bearable.

At first none of the pilots believed a word he said, and
then, as they began to be intrigued by the possibilities of what he told them,
they asked him to repeat random bits of his story, again and again. He
answered, though he refused to discuss his friendship with Laenea beyond the
fact that they were friends. It was none of their business.

Ramona-Teresa, who understood that they had been lovers,
hardly participated in the inquisition. She sat in a chair in the corner,
watching and listening and smoking a cigar.

Clearly, something strange was going on, something that had
not happened before. The speculation changed focus again and again, moving from
just exactly what was happening, to why it was occurring, to the ways it might
damage or benefit the pilots.

“No,” Radu said for at least the tenth time.
“I don’t understand what relation my time perception has to my
perception of transit. Probably none. I keep telling you, I don’t
perceive transit. But it doesn’t kill me, either.” The pilots,
growing more and more interested, drew closer to him. Another question probed
at him. He heard the inflection, but the words blended into the background like
smoke into fog, and then the noise blended into the real smoke of
Ramona’s exceptionally foul-smelling cigar. Radu wanted to ask her to put
it out but could not. He still found her as intimidating as the first time he
had met her, and this was her territory. Someone else asked another question
and he replied without even trying to hear or understand what had been said.

“It doesn’t matter. None of this matters right
now. All that matters is that I can find the lost ship, if you’ll let me
— if you’ll help me. I don’t think it’s safe to waste
time, either.”

He pushed through the half-circle of pilots and fled to the
farthest corner of the room, fighting to keep himself under control. He wished
for a window, even one peering out into the sea. He was near crying from
frustration, near collapse from the concentrated attention of all the pilots.
Someone touched his arm and he flinched violently.

“Sorry,” Orca said. “Are you okay?
Let’s go out on deck for a while.” The pitch of her voice was
several tones higher than usual, and when Radu took her hand, her fingers were
cold.

“You’re shaking,” Orca said. She chafed
his hands between hers. “And I’m about to start. What is it about
them?”

“Did anyone ever tell you about the safeguards ships
carry, in case they get lost?”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

“When I knew I had no choice but to go into transit
awake, Vasili gave me a vial of suicide pills, to use if whatever happened to
me was too much to bear. But what they’re for is if the ship gets lost
and the only other possibility is starvation or asphyxiation.” He closed
his eyes, but he could feel the tears squeezing out from beneath his eyelids
anyway. He could see the slender vial of shimmering translucent crystals.

Orca hugged him, offering comfort friend to friend. “I
never thought about it,” she said. “I guess I just thought when you
get lost, you vanish, the way it seems to the people you leave behind.”

“I don’t know how long she’ll wait,”
Radu whispered. “I don’t even know how long ‘long’ is
for her, in transit. But Laenea isn’t someone who holds back from —
from things that need to be done.” He looked across the room at the
cluster of pilots, who spoke in low tones and paid not a bit of attention to
him and Orca.

“Did you hear me, Vasili Nikolaievich?” he
shouted. “Don’t you remember the pills you offered me?” The
pilots turned to stare at him. “Ramona-Teresa, how long do you think
Laenea will wait for us? She’s too proud to choose despair.”

The older pilot left the group and strode toward him,
stopping just before the point at which they would be able to touch if each
extended a hand to the other.

“You need more patience, my boy, and so did Laenea. If
she had waited to understand herself better, it’s possible she and
Miikala would never have been lost. Perhaps none of this would have
happened.”

He was ready to fight to keep her from declaring Laenea dead
and gone. He started to speak, but she silenced him with a quick, sharp motion
of her hand.

“If we find them —” she said.

“Ramona,” Vasili said angrily, “I think
you’re letting your personal feelings —”

She needed only a glance to silence Vasili. She shook her
head, and began again. “If you find Laenea,” Ramona-Teresa said to
Radu, “she’ll still be a pilot, and you — I don’t know
what you are, but if we tried to make you into a pilot, the process would kill
you. Do you understand that? That part of it cannot change.”

“I understand,” Radu said. “I understand
that she’s suited to being a pilot and I am not. I understand that the
transition back —”

Ramona-Teresa narrowed her eyes.

“— is seldom made successfully, and would not be
attempted even if it were simple.” That was as far as his pride allowed
him to go. If the pilots thought he wanted Laenea to give up all her ambitions
and all her dreams and destroy herself for him, then they did not understand
why he loved her, or why — he believed — she had loved him.

Ramona-Teresa’s expression cleared. “The
patience will come with time. For now, you’re right to be
impatient.” She turned her attention to Orca. “You know
what’s planned? You understand the danger?”

“Yes, pilot, I do.”

“Yet you wish to crew this ship?”

“You can hardly take someone along who doesn’t
know what they’re getting into.”

“Ah, good. You also understand that no one else must know
of the attempt before we leave. The administrators —” She glanced
at Radu and laughed, a clear and hopeful sound after so much silence and grim
discussion. “If you think we’re slow to make decisions, Radu
Dracul, you should spend some time with the administrators. You will, if your
mission succeeds. You’ll learn patience then.”

Some deceit was necessary, but Ramona-Teresa had so much
seniority that by the time she, Vasili, Radu, and Orca booked passage on the
shuttle and returned to Earthstation, a ship waited to take her home for the
leave she had requested. Anyone on the crew, and nearly all the other pilots,
would have had to wait for a scheduled flight, but this was a courtesy owed to
Ramona-Teresa, which she had never before demanded. It would have been refused,
of course, if the administrators had known what she really planned to do with
their ship.

They would surely have suspected something if they had known
about the extra equipment Vasili talked out of a friend in the x-team planning
section. The administrators had given up looking for lost ships years ago and
would have forbidden the waste of resources to search for one now.