Superluminal (31 page)

“Welcome back, pilots,” she said.

“Hello, Kristen,” Ramona said. “Radu,
Orca, this is Dr. van de Graaf, of the transit board. Kristen, I believe you
are acquainted with Vasili and Laenea.”

“Yes,” she said. “Laenea and I have had
some interesting discussions about the decisions of administrators.”

Laenea said nothing. She felt annoyed not to have been told
that the surgeon was also a transit administrator. Van de Graaf smiled
slightly, assuming, no doubt, that Laenea regretted her remarks about the
conservatism of the transit authority. Quite the contrary, had Laenea known the
doctor held a position of power, she would have pressed the case more strongly.

“Please come with me.” Somehow van de Graaf made
the civility sound sincere, rather than a concession to good manners. “We
have a lot to talk about.”

Laenea glanced at Ramona, who folded her arms and shook her
head. “Indeed we do,” she said. “You may speak with Laenea
after we do, Kri.”

“No, Ramona, not this time. The event is
unique.”

Ramona chuckled. “It’s a shame that there’s
no superlative for ‘unique.’ Believe me, Kri, for once the
interests of the pilots and the interests of the administrators coincide.
It’s more important than ever for the debriefing to proceed as usual.
What happened is exactly what the debriefing is intended to explore.”

A moment of disbelief showed on van de Graaf’s face
before her control and serenity returned. Much more was going on between her
and Ramona than Laenea observed, and she felt as if her fate were being decided
in the dense silence between the administrator and the pilot.

Van de Graaf nodded abruptly. “All right.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about any of
this?” Laenea said irritably.

“No, my dear,” Ramona said easily. “Not
right now.”

Laenea followed Ramona to a small cubicle supplied with
voice recorder, writing and drawing terminal, even paper, pens, pencils, and a
set of paints.

“What you’re to do is record your impressions
and your experience of transit in whatever way is most comfortable for
you,” Ramona said. She spoke quite formally. “If you prefer some
other medium, you need only ask, and I will have the materials brought to you.
Afterwards, we can talk about it, and you’ll be free to look at the
records all the rest of us have made. Do you have any questions?”

“I guess not.”

Ramona nodded and left her alone, closing the door behind
her.

“I’ll speak,” Laenea said.

“Ready,” the recorder answered. A green light
formed in the air. Laenea stared at it for a while. “I changed my
mind,” she said. The light dissolved.

She stood, but the room was too small to pace in.

She sat at the terminal and began to type steadily and fast.
After a while she lost track even of the erratic version of time pilots still
could sense.

o0o

Orca followed Ramona to a second cubicle. The pilot opened the
door to let the diver in.

“Orca,” she said, “if you would tell us
something of your perceptions of what happened —? If you wish any other
materials, you need only ask.”

The transit administrator waited in silence with a quizzical
expression.

Orca let herself be closed inside a tiny room crammed full
of recording equipment. She was not used to making permanent material records,
or records by any mechanical means. The cousins remembered everything
perfectly. True speech was ideal for telling stories, true and imaginary,
though the distinction meant less to cetaceans than to human beings.

Orca wondered if Ramona’s offer of other materials
extended as far as a filled swimming pool. She suspected not — but then
again, who knew? She sang a few words of middle speech, but when she played it
back, it sounded all wrong, artificial, outlandish, and stilted. The
description of the edge would have to wait. She had no answers for
Ramona’s questions yet. But she had a question that Ramona might answer,
or might, at least, want to think about. She erased the recording, started it
again, and said, “What’s beyond where we were?”

o0o

“Radu,” Ramona said, “do you understand
what we hope to learn from you?”

Radu nodded, but he was glad she did not ask him if he would
be able to fulfill her hopes.

“Ramona,” van de Graaf said, “why are you
debriefing the crew?”

“You are asking me the wrong question, Kri,”
Ramona said. “The question you should be asking me is how we found the
lost ship. More accurately, who found it.”

As Radu closed the door of the cubicle, he heard the doctor
say, “Ramona, I think…” She stopped, and had to start again.
“I think you’d better tell me just what the hell happened out
there.”

In the silence of the closed room, Radu faced the banks of
machines. He sat down, picked up the pencil, chewed on its end, and scrawled a
few disconnected words in his unpracticed handwriting: trees after rain,
crystals, the texture of fish swimming upstream. Then he rubbed out what he had
written. The paper tore. He threw it away and faced a second empty sheet. He
thought of making up words, but even if he could do it, they would be only
random collections of letters to anyone but him. And without definitions,
without a way to set the meanings in his mind, they soon would dissolve to
randomness even for him. He threw away the second sheet of paper, which had not
a mark on it.

He tried the door. It remained shut, so he knocked. He felt
as if he had just attempted to take a test he had known all along that he would
fail.

Ramona-Teresa opened the door.

“I can’t,” Radu said. “I
haven’t anything to say about it. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind,” she said, with far more
understanding than he ever expected. “It’s all right.”

“I thought you’d be angry.”

“How can I be angry at you for not being able to do
something I couldn’t do myself?” She stood aside to let him into
the corridor. “Yours is hardly a unique reaction.”

Taking over for Ramona-Teresa, Dr. van de Graaf left Radu at
the clinic, where a technician told him to strip and then carried away his
clothes.

The battery of physical examinations he had to take was more
rigorous and more tedious than what he had passed to join the crew. He
remembered Laenea’s reaction to her experiences in the hospital:
“undignified.” That was certainly true. He supposed Laenea and Orca
were undergoing the same exams, but he saw neither of them, nor, indeed, anyone
else he knew.

Twelve hours later, Radu had begun to understand why Laenea,
when he first met her, had been so determined to stay out of the hospital. He
felt exhausted and trapped. He wished he could get out, out anywhere, down to
earth or back home, or even outside Earthstation in a field suit. Somewhere
beyond the region of artificial colonies and space stations lived beings who
had started out human but, generations ago, deliberately changed to something
else. They could live in vacuum, on barren rock, on the shores of molten lakes.
Radu was as strange as they — or at least that was how he felt right now
— but they were free. He envied them. He was bored and so exhausted he
could barely think straight.

He tried to endure what was demanded of him, but when
another technician — he never saw the same one twice — left him
naked and without a word of explanation in a cubicle that had no windows, no
viewscreens or terminals, not even any books, he began to lose his temper. He
tried the door, but it had neither knob nor interior controls. He knocked. No
one replied. He pressed his hand hard against the door’s surface and
tried to slide it open. That, too, failed.

It occurred to him that they might be watching him —
spying on him — and he refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing
him panic. He sat down. He let his hands lie relaxed on his knees, and waited.

Can they spy on my mind as well as my body? he wondered.

Not by telepathy, of course — he still did not believe
it existed. (Yet he thought: Laenea, can you hear me? and tried to project the
question to her, but received no response.) It would be ridiculous to suspect
the administrators of keeping some mental freak hidden away to report what
other people thought. (Yet he formed a rude image in his mind; and then he
wondered: How did Atnaterta know something would go wrong? How did I know where
Laenea was?)

If the administrators could spy on his mind, it would be a
matter of machines: sensitive recorders of electromagnetic activity, of nerve
pulses and chemical changes, of the movements of his eyes.

Radu sat very still, and sought tranquility.

Another hour passed with exquisite sloth. Radu wished he
could put aside his time-sense for a while, so he could pretend the time was
hours on hours, even days. That was what it felt like.

When the door of his cubicle finally did open, Radu had made
some decisions.

Dr. van de Graaf stepped inside and let the door close behind
her.

“I have some questions to ask you,” she said.

It was one thing to endure standing naked in front of a
panel of anonymous physicians, quite another to be interrogated by one of his
employers while stripped to the skin. The doctor had not even troubled to
change to physician’s garb; she was here in her position of transit
administrator, not surgeon.

“I would appreciate having my clothes,” Radu
said.

“You’d just have to take them off again.
There’s another series of tests we need to have the results of.”

The dismissal kindled the spark of anger that had been
growing in Radu since all this began.

“I want my clothes,” he said again, “and I
want to leave. You have no right to keep me here.”

The tone of her voice changed only a little, but it altered
her manner abruptly from transparent affability to superficial courtesy backed
by steel.

“On the contrary,” she said. “The contract
that you signed, that we signed, gave us the responsibility to treat you for
any disabilities you incur in transit.”

“I’m not disabled.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. All the evidence
we’ve collected till now indicates that it would be unsafe for you ever
to fly again.”

Radu started to object, but van de Graaf cut him off.

“Until we find out if that’s true, if you left
here without my permission, you’d be in breach of contract with the
transit authority. That in itself would make it impossible for you to work on
the crew again.”

“What makes you think I want to, after all
this?”

“You have very little choice.”

“I’ve had other jobs besides housekeeping duty
on a starship.”

“I’m sure you have. Do you have a work permit,
too?”

“What is that?”

“A document that permits you to work,” van de
Graaf said.

Radu bristled at the sarcasm. “You need permission to
work on earth? That’s a stupid system.”

“Perhaps. But without a permit you can’t get a
job. Not on earth, not in Earthstation. No one will hire you. No one can hire
you. And there’d be no means of paying you.”

“I’ve lived most of my life without money —”

“On a colony world,” van de Graaf said patiently.
“Radu Dracul, you’re in a more complex society now. You can’t
go out and forage on a space station. It’s true that back on earth, a
great deal of land has been allowed to return to wilderness. But the wild areas
are very strictly controlled. No one may enter them without permission.”

Radu looked down at his bare hands, his bare knees.

“You don’t understand that it isn’t
necessary to close me in on all sides until I cannot move or see or
breathe,” he said. “I’m as anxious as you to understand what happened
to me. It
did
happen to
me
, but no one will say a word to me
about what you have discovered.”

Van de Graaf hesitated, then sat nearby, crossed her left
leg over her right, and rested her right hand on her left ankle.

“You’re right, of course,” she said. She
made her tone placating, and her voice much kinder. “Perhaps the
difficulty is that we’ve yet to discover anything.”

Radu waited, disbelieving.

“You’re unique in our experience, but so far,
physically, there’s nothing to distinguish you from the usual range of
human beings. The range includes ordinary people who experimented with transit,
most of whom died.”

Radu waited for her to go on, but the silence continued,
stretching tautly between them.

“Do you think I can explain what happened?” Radu
said. “I know less about it than you do. If I’m not unique then the
obvious explanation is that other normal people could survive transit as well
as I did.”

“That may be true — though I doubt it but
I’m not willing to experiment with people’s lives, at least not
until we’ve explored other possibilities.”

“I’m not opposed to cooperating with you —”
Radu said.

“Good,” van de Graaf said dryly.

“ — but I want to know the purpose of what
you’re doing. I’m tired, and I’m tired of being treated as if
I’m not even here.”

That finally produced a reaction: The doctor looked at him
as if he really were here.

“Will you accept my apology?” she said.
“What’s happened has put us all into quite a state of confusion.
Things aren’t running as smoothly as I’d like. But I will instruct
the technicians to explain the purpose of each procedure. I’d like you to
take just one more test, a neurological examination, then answer a few
questions. After that, I’ll try to answer your questions. Is that
acceptable?”

“If —”

Van de Graaf’s laugh was both sympathetic and
charming. “If you can have some clothes. Of course.”

Van de Graaf was as good as her word: The technician who
came in brought a gown for Radu to wear. He even explained what was going on.

“The nerve scan is like making a giant circuit diagram
of the nervous system,” he said. “After I record the data I feed it
into the computer, which does a statistical analysis to compare the way your
brain cells interact with each other and with the rest of your body’s
nerve fibers. Then we look at your profile against the average.”