Superluminal (27 page)

He became hyperaware of the small sounds of the ship, the
ventilation’s slow drift, the stretch and turn of leaves seeking
starlight. He felt the nubbly blue of the upholstery beneath his spread
fingers, and smelled oxygen’s occasional ionization.

A whistle lanced through his hearing.

Vasili’s cheerful notes, in a random cadence, implied
good news, but the sound grated on Radu’s nerves. He put his hands over
his ears and decided he preferred the pilot irritable, and silent. The
whistling continued.

You shouldn’t be bothered by it, Radu thought.
It’s practically imperceptible in here.

But once it had begun to trouble him he could not make it
stop. He moved his hands back and forth over his ears, filling his hearing with
raspy distant ocean sounds. But he could still hear the whistling.

Go and ask him to stop, he told himself.

That was as ridiculous as being troubled by the noise in the
first place.

He hunched over with his head on his crossed arms. He
started breathing shallowly, rapidly, and his heart pounded, drowning out the
whistling and conscious thought as well. Lying down, he curled up on his side
with his knees to his chest, trying to ease the pain as his pulse dissolved
into a useless flutter.

He gasped for breath, rolled face downward, and spread his
hands against the cool floor. Then, knowing his only hope of survival was to
force away the panic, he very deliberately took control of his body’s
reactions.

He was adequate at biocontrol: On occasion, under ideal
conditions, he could even achieve deep trance. Conditions were far from ideal,
but deep trance was not what he needed. Rather, he needed to dissipate stress
before its build-up destroyed him. Breathing came first: He breathed slowly,
deeply, and very, very regularly.

Radu slowed and eased his heartbeat. He could feel his blood
pressure falling. He pulled his knees to his chest, then straightened his legs
and pushed himself to a headstand, supported in the corner. His mind grew calm
and clear as he imposed upon it the patterns of relaxation.

He only noticed how long he had stayed like that when he
heard one of the pilots speaking. After a while it registered that the pilot
was speaking to him.

“What’s the matter? Is he all right?”
Ramona’s voice came faintly from the control room.

Vasili paused quite a long time before replying. “I
guess
he’s all right,” he said with irritation. “He’s
standing on his head in the corner.”

Radu realized how silly he must look. He opened his eyes.
The pilot looked equally ridiculous, from Radu’s viewpoint. Radu started
to laugh, and collapsed in a heap, giggling absurdly.

“When you’re finished, let me know.”
Vasili stalked away.

Radu climbed to his feet, still laughing. He supposed he
should feel humiliated; instead, he felt calm and relaxed and in possession of
himself for the first time in far too long. Whether he could maintain the
fragile grasp he did not know.

He returned to the control room. “I am finished,”
he said to Vasili.

Ramona-Teresa gazed at him, her distress plain. “Are
you all right?”

“Yes. Now.”

“What happened?”

“I… reacted badly. The way I did on
Earthstation, and when I was — when Laenea and I were together.”

Ramona frowned. “Did you stop breathing? Was your
heartbeat arrhythmic?”

He shrugged. “For a moment.”

She hesitated for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was
very low and sad. “I think we must turn back.”

“What? Why? No!”

“Because our search is a long chance, one only worth
taking if there isn’t any risk to you.”

“That’s up to me.”

“No,” she said, “it isn’t. Radu,
I’ve seen pilots react badly to ordinaries, but not the other way around.
I’m worried. If something happens to you in transit, and you can’t
control it yourself, neither Vaska nor I could help you till the ship returned
to normal space. Restarting your heart, regulating your breathing — we
simply would not be able to do it. We
could not
.” She paused.
“By the time we left transit, it might be too late. Do you
understand?”

“Yes,” Radu said. “I do. It’s all
right. And I’m all right. We’ve got to keep going — we
can’t give up now.”

She smiled slowly, sadly. “You think we’ll find
them, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m afraid to believe you, but I’m
beginning to.”

Vasili swung his chair around. “Are you two done
arguing?”

“Yes, Vaska, I think that we are.”

“Then I’m taking us back into transit,”
Vasili said. “Right… now.”

Radu hoped — the universe turned gray — for
something more. Disappointed, but resigned, he let the seconds start ticking
away again, taking him closer and closer to the final intersection, where the
only test that counted lay.

o0o

“How much longer?” Vasili asked.

“
What?
” Radu could not believe a pilot
had asked such a question. “The last time I tried to tell you that, you
screamed at me. Why do you want to know something that’s meaningless to
you? And dangerous as well?”

“Go ahead and tell me — if you can make sense
out of space here, maybe I can make sense of time.”

“Sense!” Radu burst out laughing.

“Just tell me if it’s soon.”

“It’s soon.”

The time passed, and Radu searched the viewport for
anything, even a depth to the faceless gray. He began a silent countdown of the
seconds in his mind.

“I’m going to have to turn,” Vasili said.
“We’re headed straight for an anomaly.”

One of the bright hallucinations glimmered, not at the edge
of Radu’s vision, but in the center, and this time it remained. He
blinked, expecting it to vanish like the others.

Instead it widened, and at the same time its substance
coalesced, the colors intensifying and thickening, intertwining and parting
like the threads of a tapestry.

“Did you hear me?” Vasili cried. “If this
is where Miikala and Laenea went, they’re gone, forever, and we’ll
be lost, too!”

Radu stayed completely still, afraid that any motion, any
glance away, would send the pattern to the edge of his sight, there to vanish.

“Ramona!” Vasili shouted.

“Yes, turn, quickly!”

“No, Vasili, don’t!”

The younger pilot swung the ship from the shiny crazed
surface. Radu lunged. He shouldered Vasili out of the way, knocking him to the
deck. The controls were warm in his hands. He forced them against the whole
momentum of the ship, and the lurch penetrated the artificial gravity. Radu
staggered and almost fell. The enormous patch, glazed with deep color, wider
and higher than the ship, opened out to receive them. It became a soap bubble,
lucid, transparent, an aurora that spun curtains even more intense than those
of the flaming skies of Twilight. It was a solid coruscation of curvetting
fire.

Radu guided the ship straight into it.

Vasili screamed.

The transit ship shuddered. Radu expected, any moment, a
breach of the hull, the shriek of escaping air, the slow end of sound. But the
ship passed into the aurora, and the aurora passed into the ship. Through dimensions
Radu had imagined but could not describe, the color rained upon him and passed
through his skin and flesh and bones. He shivered as it touched him. He felt
that he could reach out and sweep the universe up in his arms, from its
beginning to its end.

For that moment, he understood what pilots knew about
transit.

Radu slumped down in the pilot’s chair, dazzled and
confounded. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Everything around him,
machines and people, was surrounded by light and shadows. He rubbed his eyes,
but the shadows remained.

Vasili pulled himself up from the deck, lurched at Radu, and
grabbed the front of his shirt.

“What did you see? Tell me what you saw!”

Radu stared at his hand, fascinated by the multiple images,
scared and exhilarated at the same time. He reached out to make Vasili release
his grip, but as soon as he touched him, the young pilot cursed and snatched
his hand away. Radu wanted to feel sorry for him, he wanted to feel anger
toward him, but he could spare the attention for neither.

“Dammit, tell me —”

“Vasili, Radu,” Ramona said softly,
“look.”

She pointed at the viewport.

Don’t block it out, this time, Radu thought.
Don’t persuade yourself that you can’t see anything.

He turned, slowly, and looked where Ramona was pointing.

A set of images like broken shards of a mirror: Before them
lay the irregular silver and shadow twinkle of another transit ship.

Ramona took the controls. Intently, she guided their ship
toward the other one.

Vasili snarled a curse and tried to pull Radu from the
pilot’s chair. Radu stood, gingerly testing his changed perceptions. He
gazed down at Vasili, seeking out the true image among the multitude of similar
reflections.

“I’d tell you what I saw if I could,” he
said. “Please believe me. It’s just that I haven’t figured it
out myself yet.”

“I
don’t
believe you!”

“Stop it, both of you,” Ramona said angrily,
“and prepare for docking.”

She docked the ship noisily, messily; the two craft clanged
together and the fittings locked and held as momentum and inertia combined to
give an awkward spin. Without pausing to correct, she jumped up and rushed
toward the airlock. Ignoring Vasili, Radu hurried after her.

He crashed into a wall, banging his shoulder hard. Tears
filled his eyes, further fragmenting the multiple visions. He shook his head,
scrubbing his sleeve across his eyes. The airlock started its cycle. He moved
toward it, feeling his way along the passage.

Ramona stepped into the other ship. Radu hesitated. The
pilot’s footsteps echoed and re-echoed. He followed.

She did not pause in the darkened box room, but Radu
stopped. The sensors and instrument lights gave off a vague glow. Radu bent
over a sleep chamber, trying to make out the calibration. All he could be sure
of was that it registered activity.

“Ramona, the crew member’s alive,” he
said.

She kept on going.

“Laenea —” Radu meant to shout, but her
name came out in a whisper.

He followed Ramona into the crew lounge. She stopped so
suddenly that he almost ran into her, then she took a few hesitant steps, and
stopped again. A body lay on the couch. The sheet covering it obscured its
outlines.

Radu saw a man living, a man dead, a man decayed. He gasped,
watching the transition to ashes.

Ramona drew the sheet away and gazed down at Miikala’s
body in silence.

There was only grief in her expression, not revulsion or
fear or surprise: She could not be seeing what Radu had seen. Miikala’s
body was reality for her. Radu could make sense of the rest of the images only
as projections from the past, from the future, as if spatial dimensions and
time had become equally accessible to him.

Radu was over being startled and he could not be repelled,
for he had seen far worse deaths on Twilight. Trying not to shut himself off
completely from what he had learned to see, but knowing he must simplify it or
be as good as blind, Radu gradually projected each shadow back onto a single
reality that he chose as best he could. The process was something like drawing
a three-dimensional cube onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper, something like
changing the focus of his eyes from very far away to very near.

Slowly he brought himself to a world where the shadows did
not blot out the objects, a world less overwhelming to his senses. But it was
not what it had been before. He doubted it ever would be what it had been
before.

Ramona knelt at Miikala’s side and touched his throat,
seeking — surely not a pulse, but warmth, some sign of life. Radu wished
he could touch her, draw back her hand, embrace her without causing her pain,
for she could only find sorrow here. Miikala was dead.

Even if Miikala had committed suicide, Radu knew Laenea
would not leave a crew member to wake up when the anesthetic ran out, to die
horribly and alone.

He walked past Ramona and into the control room.

One hand dangling to the floor, Laenea lay sprawled in the
pilot’s chair, her breathing mask over her face, the instruments blinking
around her. Radu approached, terrified, afraid of seeing again the transition
to bones and ashes.

“Laenea?” His voice broke.

Her hand moved. He started violently at the faint sound of
her fingertips brushing the deck.

And then she stretched, and pushed away the mask, and
yawned. She shook back her hair, just the way she had during the few days they
had been together, when he watched her awaken from a sound sleep.

“Laenea —”

She leaped to her feet, spinning around to face him, her
long black hair tangled.

“Radu!” She looked around, still half asleep and
confused. “I was dreaming about you — I’m still dreaming, I
must be!”

“No, this is real. We came to find you.”

He began to smile; she laughed, her wonderful, open laugh of
delight and surprise; Radu’s smile turned into his absurd and
embarrassing giggle, bubbling up with joy. They threw themselves into each
other’s arms, in a long, unbelieving embrace. Neither cared that one was
a pilot and the other was not.

“How can you be here?” She pulled back a little;
she touched the base of his throat where the pilot’s scar would end, if
he had one. “You aren’t a pilot, but you’re awake — and
alive —”

“I don’t know how to explain. I woke up in
transit. I knew your ship was in trouble.”

“In trouble —? But —” She ran out of
breath, grabbed her mask, and took a deep gulp of oxygen. “Sorry,
I’m not used to that yet.”

“They declared your ship lost. But… something…
happened to me in transit. I
knew
you were out here, and alive.”