Superluminal (3 page)

He nodded sadly. “I should not have
asked…”

“That’s all right.”

“I’m too old, you see. Too old for adventure. I
came here so long ago… but the time, the time disappeared. I never knew
what happened. I’ve dreamed about it. Bad dreams…”

“I understand. I was crew for ten years. We never knew
what happened either.”

“That would be worse, yes. Over and over again, no
time between. But now you know.”

“Pilots know,” Laenea agreed. She handed him the
credit key. Though he still tried to refuse it, she insisted on paying.

Hugging the cloak around her, Laenea stepped out into the
fog. She fantasied that the shop would now disappear, like all legendary shops
dispensing magic and cloaks of invisibility. But she did not look back, for
everything a few paces away dissolved into grayness. In a small space around
each low antique streetlamp, heat swirled the fog in wisps toward the sky.

o0o

The midnight ferry sped silently across the water, propelled
through the waves by great silver sails. Wrapped in her cloak, Laenea was
anonymous. She put her feet on the opposite bench, stretched, and gazed out the
window into the darkness. Laenea could see her own reflection, and, beyond, the
water. Light from the ferry wavered across the long low swells.

o0o

The spaceport was a huge, floating, artificial island. It
gleamed in its own lights. The solar mirrors looked like the multiple compound
eyes of a gigantic water insect, an illusion continued by the spidery reach of
launching towers. The port’s other sea-level buildings curved like hills,
like sand dunes, offering surfaces that might have been smoothed by the wind.
Tall, angular buildings suitable to the mainland would have presented sail-like
faces to the northwest storms.

Overhead, a small, silver-blue blimp passed by, driven by
quiet engines. Laenea remembered arriving once a few hours before a storm hit,
when all the airships on the port launched simultaneously in a brilliant
multicolored cloud and vanished toward the horizon to escape the weather.

Beneath the platform, under a vibration-deadening lower layer,
under the sea, lay the tripartite city. The roar of shuttles taking off and the
scream of their return would drive mad anyone who long remained on the surface.
Thus the northwest spaceport was far out to sea, away from cities, carrying a
city within its underwater stabilizing shafts.

The ferry furled its sails, slowed, and nestled against the
ramp that met it at the waterline. Electric trucks hummed into motion,
breaching the silence. Laenea moved stiffly down the stairs. Pausing by the
gangway, watching the trucks roll past, she concentrated for a moment and felt
the increase in her blood pressure. She could well understand how dangerous it
might be, and how easily addictive the higher speed, driving her high until
like a machine her body was burned out. But for now her energy began returning
and the stiffness in her legs and back slowly seeped away.

o0o

Except for the trucks, which purred off quickly around the
island’s perimeter and disappeared, the port was silent, so late at
night. The passenger shuttle waited empty on its central rail. When Laenea
entered, it sensed her, slid its doors shut, and accelerated. A pushbutton
command halted it above stabilizer #3, which held quarantine, administration,
and crew quarters. Laenea felt good, warm, and her vision sparkled bright and
clear. She let the velvet cloak flow back across her shoulders, no longer
needing its protection. She was alight with the expectation of seeing her
friends, in her new avatar.

The elevator led through the center of the stabilizer into
the underwater city. Laenea rode it all the way to the bottom of the shaft, one
of three that projected into the ocean far below the surface turbulence to hold
the platform steady even through the most violent storms. The shafts maintained
the island’s flotation level as well, pumping sea water into or out of
the ballast tanks when a shuttle took off or landed or a ferry crept on board.

The elevator doors opened into the foyer where a spiral
staircase reached the lowest level, a bubble at the tip of the main shaft. The
lounge was a comfortable cylindrical room, its walls all transparent, gazing
out like a continuous eye into the deep sea. Floodlights cast a glow through
the cold clear water, picking out the bright speedy forms of fish, large dark
predators, scythe-mouthed sharks, the occasional graceful bow of a porpoise,
the elegant black-and-white presence of a killer whale. As the radius of
visibility increased, the light filtered through bluer and bluer, until
finally, in violet, vague shapes eased back and forth with shy curiosity
between dim illumination and complete darkness.

The lounge, sculpted with structural foam, then carpeted,
gave the illusion of being underwater, on the ocean floor itself, a part of the
sea. It had been built originally as a public lounge, but was taken over by
unconscious agreement among the starship people. Outsiders, gently ignored,
felt unwelcome and soon departed. Journalists came infrequently, reacting to
sensation or disaster. Human transit pilots had been a sensation, but the
novelty had worn away. Laenea did not mind a bit.

She took off her boots and left them by the stairwell. She
recognized one of the other pairs: She would have been hard put not to
recognize those boots after seeing them once. The scarlet leather was
stupendously shined, embroidered with jewels, and inlaid with tiny liquid
crystal disks that changed color with the temperature. Laenea smiled. Crew
members made up for the dead time of transit in many different ways; one was to
overdo all other aspects of their lives, and the most flamboyant of that group
was Minoru.

Walking barefoot in the deep carpet, between the hillocks
and hollows of conversation pits, was like walking on the floor of a fantasy
sea. Laenea wondered if the attraction of the lounge was its relation to the
ocean, which still held mysteries as deep as any she would encounter in space
or in transit. Laenea had often sat gazing through the shadowed water,
dreaming. Pilots and divers could guess at the truth of her assumption.

Near the transparent sea wall she saw Minoru, his black hair
braided with scarlet and silver to his waist; tall Alannai hunched down to be
closer to the others, the light on her skin like dark opal, glinting in her
close-cropped hair like diamond dust; and pale, quiet Ruth, whose sparkling was
rare but nova bright. Holding goblets or mugs, they sat sleepily conversing,
and Laenea felt the comfort of a familiar scene.

Minoru, facing her, looked up. She smiled, expecting him to
call her name and fling out his arms, as he always did, with his ebullient
greeting, showing to advantage the fringe and beadwork on his jacket. But he
looked at her, straight on, silent, with an expression so blank that only the
unlined long-lived youthfulness of his face could have held it. He whispered
her name. Ruth glanced over her shoulder, saw Laenea, and smiled tentatively,
as though she were afraid. Alannai unbent, and, head and shoulders above the
others, raised her glass solemnly to Laenea. “Pilot,” she said, and
drank, and hunched back down with her elbows on her sharp knees. Laenea stood
above them, outside their circle, gazing down on three people whom she had
kissed good-bye. Crew always said good-bye, for they slept through their
voyages without any certainty that they would ever awaken. They lived in the
cruel childhood prayer, “If I should die before I wake…”

Laenea climbed down to them. The circle opened, but she
remained outside it. She was as overwhelmed by uncertainty as her friends.

“Sit with us,” Ruth said finally. Alannai and Minoru
looked uneasy. Laenea sat down. The triangle between Ruth and Alannai and
Minoru did not alter. Each of them was next to the other; Laenea was beside
none of them.

Ruth reached out, but her hand trembled. They all waited,
and Laenea tried to think of words to reassure them, to affirm that she had not
changed.

“I came… ” But nothing she felt seemed
right to tell them. She would not taunt them with her freedom. She took
Ruth’s outstretched hand. “I came to say good-bye.” She
embraced them and kissed them and climbed back to the main level. They had all
been friends, but her friends accepted her no longer.

The first pilots did not mingle with the crew, for the
responsibility was great, the tensions greater. But Laenea had thought it would
be different for her. She cared for Ruth and Minoru and Alannai. Her concern
would remain when she watched them sleeping and ferried them from one island of
light to the next. She tried to understand her friends’ reserve, and
hoped perhaps they only needed time to get used to her.

Conversations ebbed and flowed around her like the tides as
she moved through the lounge. Seeing people she knew, she avoided them. Her
pride exceeded her loneliness.

She put aside the pain of her rejection. She felt
self-contained and self-assured. When she recognized two pilots, sitting
together, isolated, she approached them straightforwardly. She had flown with
both of them, but never talked at length with either. They would accept her, or
they would not: For the moment, she did not care. She flung back the cloak so
they would know her. Without even thinking about it, she had dressed the way
all pilots dressed. Laced vests or deeply cut gowns, transparent shirts,
halters, all in one way or another revealed the long scar that marked their changes.

Miikala and Ramona-Teresa sat facing each other, elbows on
knees, talking together quietly, privately. Ramona-Teresa touched
Miikala’s hand, and they both laughed softly. Even the rhythms of their
conversation seemed alien to Laenea, though she could not hear their words.
Like other people they communicated as much with their bodies and hands as with
speech, but the nods and gestures clashed.

Laenea wondered what pilots talked about. Certainly it could
not be the ordinary concerns of ordinary people, the laundry, the shopping, a
place to stay, a person, perhaps, to stay with. They would talk about…
the experiences they alone had; they would talk about what they saw when all
others must sleep near death or die.

Human pilots withstood transit better than machine
intelligence, but human pilots too were sometimes lost. Miikala and
Ramona-Teresa were ten percent of all the pilots who survived from the first
generation, ten percent of their own unique, evolving, almost self-contained
society. They had proven time-independence successful by example; it was up to
the pilots who came after, to Laenea, to prove it practical.

As Laenea stopped on the edge of the pit above them, they
fell silent and gazed solemnly up at her.

Ramona-Teresa, a small, heavyset woman with black hair
graying to roan, smiled and lifted her glass. “Pilot!” Miikala,
whose eyes were shadowed by heavy brow ridges and an unruly shock of dark brown
hair, matched the salute and drank with her.

This toast was a tribute and a welcome, not a farewell.
Laenea smiled and lowered herself into the pit. Miikala touched her left wrist,
Ramona-Teresa her right. Laenea felt, welling up inside her, a bubbling,
childish giggle. She could not stop it; it broke free as if filled with helium
like a balloon. She might have been in an environment on the sea floor,
breathing oxyhelium and speaking donaldduck. She felt the blood rushing through
the veins in her temples and her throat. Miikala was smiling, saying something
in a language with as many liquid vowels as his name; she did not understand a
word, yet she knew everything he was saying. Ramona-Teresa hugged her.
“Welcome, child.”

Laenea could not believe that these lofty, eerie people
could accept her with such joy. She realized she had hoped, at best, for a cool
and condescending greeting not too destructive of her pride. The embarrassing
giggle slipped up and out again, but this time she did not try to restrain it.
All three pilots laughed together. Laenea felt high, light, dizzy: Excitement
pumped adrenaline through her body. She was hot. Tiny beads of perspiration
gathered on her forehead, just at the hairline.

Quite suddenly the constant dull ache in her chest became a
wrenching pain, as though her new heart were being ripped from her, like the
old. She could not breathe. She hunched forward, struggling for air. Each time
she tried to draw in a breath, the pain drove it out again.

Slowly Miikala’s voice slipped beyond her panic, and
Ramona-Teresa’s hands steadied her.

“Relax, relax, remember your training…”

Yes: decrease the blood flow, open the arteries, dilate the
capillaries, discipline the involuntary muscles to voluntary control. Slow the
pump. Someone bathed her forehead with a cocktail napkin dipped in gin. Laenea
welcomed the coolness and even the odor’s bitter tang. The pain dissolved
gradually until Ramona-Teresa could ease her back on the sitting shelf. The jet
fastening of the cloak fell away from her throat and the older pilot loosened
the laces of her vest.

“It’s all right,” Ramona-Teresa said.
“The adrenaline works as well as ever. We all have to learn more control
of that than they think they need to teach us.”

Sitting on his heels beside Laenea, Miikala glanced at the
exposed scar. “You’re out early,” he said. “Have they
changed the procedure?”

Laenea paled: She had forgotten that her leavetaking of the
hospital was something less than official and approved.

“Don’t tease her, Miikala,” Ramona-Teresa
said gruffly. “Or don’t you remember how it was when you woke
up?”

His heavy eyebrows drew together in a scowl. “I
remember.”

“Will they make me go back? Will you?” Laenea
said. “I’m all right, I just need to get used to it.”

“We won’t, but they might try to,”
Ramona-Teresa said. “They worry so about the money they spend on us.
Perhaps they aren’t quite as worried anymore. We do as well on our own as
shut up in a hospital listening to recorded hearts — they still do that,
I suppose.”