Superluminal (30 page)

“Orca!”

The melody never faltered. Radu reached for her. His hand
passed through the skin of her suit, the two fields merged, and he grasped her
arm directly.

“Orca!”

Her haunted song touched him like a lover. He turned off his
radio, but the sound passed directly between them and he could not block it
out. He pulled Orca around to face him. She had a strange, lost, searching look
in her eyes that frightened him, because he had only seen that look before in
the eyes of people who knew they were going to die. She fell silent.

Radu reached behind him and stroked the lifeline to make it
contract, willing it not to dissolve from the stress and abandon them. He drew
Orca closer, every moment expecting her to break loose, flee beyond his reach,
and lose herself before he could call for help, as he should have done in the
first place. But she remained quiescent. He embraced her and their suit fields
melded together into a single entity. Orca’s heart beat fast and hard.

Radu risked a glance toward the ship and saw to his relief
that the lifeline was contracting and thickening slowly but steadily, pulling
them back to safety.

When they had cycled back through the airlock, Radu turned
off the suits.

“What do you think you were doing out there? Good gods
—!” He pulled off his suit collar and threw it into its container.

“I need to get closer to it,” she said. “I
need to see it more clearly —”

“There isn’t any ‘it’ to get close
to!”

“You don’t understand. You don’t
understand anything. All my senses are different from yours —”

“This is absurd. Come away.”

He removed her suit collar, as gently as he had ever dressed
a child in the nursery where he had worked on Twilight.

“It’ll be better to come back later. We need
more than just the x-team computer to study what’s out here, we need the
ship and the specialists, too.”

“I know we do,” Orca said bitterly. “But
what chance do you think I’ve got to come back?”

“Oh…” Radu said. “Oh. I hadn’t
thought of that.”

“Why should you? They’ll let you go —
they’ll probably make you go even if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t think —”

“Half the instruments they send will be for studying
the edge, and the other half will be for studying
you!
”

“But you’re here — you volunteered —”

She made a rude and derisive noise. “Who
wouldn’t volunteer? Ninety percent of the crew is on the exploratory
mission waiting list! I’ve got no seniority and none of the right
credentials!”

“Orca…” Radu stopped. She was, all too
probably, quite right. He wished he could laugh off what she said. But she was
right.

She cursed again and strode away. Radu waited, giving her
time to regain her composure, then followed her to the box room. Her sleep
chamber stood ready.

“You must go to sleep, Orca, we have to go
home.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep, I want to stay
awake —” She spun on him and grabbed his wrist, clenching her
fingers around the sore, bruised slash.

Radu winced.

“Nothing would happen to me in transit, it’s all
mistakes, it’s all lies!” Orca glared at her sleep chamber.

Lying down and letting his consciousness dissolve into the
dream-filled anesthetic darkness would have been a comfort for Radu.

“If I don’t get in there,” Orca said,
“who’s to say I won’t survive?”

Radu shook his head, remembering Marc. “The risks are
real, Orca. I don’t know why I’m immune to them, but they’re
real. Maybe they’ll catch up to me.”

“What do you see, Radu?” Orca asked softly.
“What’s in transit?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I
can’t describe it. I’m sorry, the pilots are right, there
aren’t any words. I can’t even remember what it looked like, what
it felt like, because there aren’t any words for it and I haven’t
got any way to set it in my mind.”

Orca pushed off her right shoe with the toe of her left, the
left shoe with her bare right toes. She clenched her hands and flexed her feet.
Her extended claws scraped the deck.

“There are words for it,” she said. “But
not your words.”

She hugged him tightly, desperately. He clasped her to him,
feeling the long strong muscles of her back move beneath the rough texture of
her vest. He touched her fine hair. She withdrew from their embrace, squeezed
his hand, and faced her sleep chamber as if it were an enemy.

He stayed near, even after the instruments showed she was
asleep. He waited until he was sure for himself that she was under the
anesthetic. He watched her sleep, envying her and pitying her both at the same
time.

He joined Laenea in her ship.

“Orca’s asleep.”

“Good.” She waited expectantly.

“What’s the matter?” Radu said.

“You tell me — you’re the one who
didn’t want the ship to accelerate yet.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Orca… Orca needed
another few minutes to look around.” He said nothing of the diver’s
odd behavior, for he suspected that if it became known to the administrators,
her future in the crew might be seriously compromised.

Laenea raised one eyebrow, then shrugged and turned on the
intercom. “Ramona, Vasili, I’m going to take us home.”

The other pilots’ seniority meant nothing anymore.
Laenea’s perceptions would create another level to the hierarchy. As for
Radu’s ability — whatever it was — he had no idea what it
would do.

Radu watched from the second pilot’s place, copilot of
an unplanned exploration, as the two linked ships dove down into transit. He
braced himself for the change.

This time he made the transition calmly. He embraced the
perceptions; he let them flow into him, and flowed around them himself. The
sensation of being able to encompass and comprehend the whole universe swept
him up.

His sight blurred slightly, but he could keep track of what
was here and now, what was the past, what the future. Curiously, and with some
trepidation, he looked at Laenea.

Her image exploded into such a multiplicity of visions that
Radu shoved himself back in his chair, astonished and confused.

He closed his eyes and sorted himself back into reality,
seeking an explanation of what had happened. He could not perceive Laenea the
way he had Miikala. Miikala’s possibilities were ended, Laenea’s
just begun. They increased every moment, with every decision, every subatomic
interaction. He could see an unambiguous future for a living creature only from
the moment of its death.

In the ordinary fashion, without trying to track her, he
watched Laenea. The artificial gravity obscured changes in velocity whether the
ship was in normal space or in transit.

“Tell me what you’re doing,” Radu said.

“I took us a little way through seventh, you
can’t go very far in it or you end up at the other end of the universe
— or back where you started.” She disappeared behind her oxygen
mask for a moment. “As soon as we get back to where Miikala died,
we’ll retrace my training flight. I know all the coordinates; it’d
be a lot shorter distance if we cut across, but I haven’t enough
experience and Vasili would rather sulk than pilot.”

“His pride’s hurt,” Radu said.
“He’s used to being the best. Then you come along, and do something
he can’t… Even worse,
I
come along, a crew member —”

“Stop shrugging off what you’ve done, Radu!
Vaska knows it’s extraordinary, and I certainly know it, because you gave
me back my life.”

“How could I not?” Radu said, smiling. “I
owed you mine. Haven’t I told you people from Twilight always pay their
debts?”

She grinned back at him, reached out automatically for his
hand, but stopped before she touched him. She turned the movement into a shrug
of inevitability.

“Is it different out there now for you?”

“No,” he said, glad of the change of subject.
“No, I felt — or saw, I don’t know how to describe it, it was
a sensation that existed inside my mind, but something, while you piloted us
through seventh. But now it’s just the same as before, there’s
nothing out there.” He looked at the viewport, still somehow expecting it
to change.

When he glanced back at Laenea, he found her staring at him
intently.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, startled by
her frown.

She relaxed her concentration, shrugged, and laughed.

“I was performing an experiment,” she said,
“but I disproved my hypothesis.”

“What was it?”

“That you found me by hearing my thoughts.”

“I don’t believe there’s such a thing as telepathy.”

“It was worth a try, but I thought at you as hard as I
could, and nothing happened, you didn’t hear anything, or feel it, or
whatever you did.”

“No,” he said. What I did was find you again,
Radu thought. I found you once, and lost you through my own failure. If
I’d failed you a second time I thought it would have meant your life.

He felt embarrassed to say that out loud. Instead, he
shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You weren’t really lost. You
would have found your way home.”

“Would I? The ship was out of control the whole time I
tried to help Miikala, and when it stopped, I didn’t know where I was.
Say it took me a year to find a way back — you can figure out better than
I can how long that would have been on earth.”

The information came unbidden into Radu’s mind. He
pushed it away. He would have been long dead when Laenea returned, far in the
future and forgotten. The prospect of his own death did not trouble him —
he had been on borrowed time ever since he survived the plague — but the
idea of living out his life believing Laenea was dead, unable to help her while
she struggled to survive, sent a shiver through him.

“Are you all right?” Laenea said.

“Yes. But I’ve changed…

“I know,” she said. “So have I.”

She put her hand on his, and slid her fingers up to his
wrist. He felt his pulse against the pressure, a strong, steady beat. The beat
suddenly clenched into a wave of darkness. Radu gasped.

Laenea jerked her hand back with a sharp exclamation of
surprise. Radu’s vision cleared. Laenea rubbed her hand as if it had
received an electric shock. She met his gaze, with regret.

“Neither of us has changed enough, have we?”
Radu said. If anything, he was less compatible with pilots, she less compatible
with normal human beings, than they had been before.

Laenea shook her head. “We’ve changed too
much,” she said. “And in all the wrong ways.”

Radu looked down at his hands. Beneath the dirty bandage on
his wrist, the cut itched. He rubbed it.

“I love you,” he said suddenly. “None of
this makes any difference, not that you’re a pilot and I can’t be,
not that we can’t be together. I still love you.”

“I know,” she said softly. “I’m
sorry.”

o0o

The transit ship shimmered into Einsteinian space. Laenea
scanned for the beacon, found it, locked in and analyzed it, and felt pleased
by her accuracy. She was only a few hours from Earthstation. She was, in fact,
only just outside the limit at which it was felt to be safe to surface from a
transit dive. She plotted a course toward the station. The two docked ships
slowly spun, then gently accelerated.

Normal space seemed flat and dull to her. She could see the
fourth spatial dimension of ordinary objects, and force one more perspective
upon them, but sixth was lost, and seventh almost unimaginable. Seventh was
what thrilled her. Laenea very nearly turned the ship around and fled back into
transit.

Instead, she signaled Earthstation. Suspecting a hoax, the controller
who answered reacted first with disbelief, then, when he accepted what she
said, with astonishment. He disappeared from the channel; when he returned, the
background noise had changed to that of shocked and excited conversations.

Despite the uniqueness of the ship’s return, the
ordinary work remained. Laenea roused the computers, and Radu helped Orca out
of transit sleep. But Laenea’s crew member woke in a state of confusion
and exhaustion bordering on shock. They put him to bed, undrugged, for some
real sleep.

The news of a lost ship’s return was spreading
rapidly. Laenea had the easy task of telling her crew member’s family
that he was alive, and would be well.

Ramona took the job of contacting Miikala’s family. By
the time she got through to them she had to destroy their raised hopes. Nothing
she could say could ease their grief; perhaps only another pilot could
understand the factors that tempered it.

Two hours later Laenea docked the ships with Earthstation
and logged them in. Only after she had finished did she remember that Ramona
had the right and the responsibility to command the ships, and, after her,
Vasili. Vasili remained in his cabin, and Ramona had hardly spoken since
contacting Miikala’s family. Now, in a silent depression, Ramona deferred
to Laenea without comment or objection.

Laenea started to apologize, but the older pilot nodded.

“Fine,” she said. Her voice held resignation.
“Never mind, it was a good return.”

Laenea felt uncomfortable, and a little wild.

“But what now?” When she was still in the crew
she had always had several hours’ work to finish after docking. As a
pilot, she was at the end of her duties.

“The administrators will have plans for you,”
Ramona said. “But so do the pilots.”

A medical team was already waiting when Laenea opened the
hatch. They took Laenea’s crew member off to the clinic, and carried away
Miikala’s shrouded body. Ramona watched them go. Laenea moved nearer to
the older pilot, wondering if Ramona might break down again. Instead, she blinked
quickly, raised her head, straightened up, and looked exactly her old self. Her
grief concealed, she led Laenea and the others into Earthstation.

The shuttle bay, usually active and busy, was so quiet and
empty that the footsteps approaching them echoed. Dr. van de Graaf, the surgeon
who had performed the operation on Laenea to make her a pilot, stopped in front
of Ramona and regarded her coolly. She wore a severely tailored business suit
and looked, if possible, even more self-possessed than before.