Superluminal (32 page)

“How often do you find differences?”

“Oh, always,” the technician said cheerfully.
“I’ve never seen anybody who matched the average exactly. But the
differences can tell a lot.”

Radu submitted to the scan.

After that, they finally did give him back his clothes.

They gave him Dr. van de Graaf’s few questions, too;
they turned out to be a long, computer-based interrogation. The voice that
spoke to him was, unlike most machine speech, so monotonous and hypnotic as to
be, at times, nearly incomprehensible. At first Radu could answer most of the
questions without thinking about them. He drifted in and out of paying
attention. But the voice probed further and further into his past until it
returned him to Twilight, to the plague. He wished he could answer those
questions without thought.

The voice stopped abruptly. A few minutes later van de Graaf
came in.

“I appreciate your patience,” she said
sincerely.

Radu was too tired to protest any more; he was so tired he
even felt grateful to be treated with simple courtesy.

“Never mind,” he said.

“Tell me a little about yourself,” she said.
“Tell me about your childhood on Twilight.”

“It was the same as anybody else’s,” he
said. “The same as that of anyone from a colony world, I imagine. You
learn how to do everything adequately, and you’re an expert at
nothing.”

“You’d say you were unexceptional?”

“Completely.”

“What do you remember about having the plague?”

“Almost nothing. I remember Laenea —”

“Laenea!”

“Yes. She was on the emergency ship. Its whole crew
landed and helped us. Didn’t you know?”

“No. That’s very interesting. Do you remember
anyone else?”

“No. When the ship arrived I had just fallen ill. All
I remember is that Laenea helped me. I would have died otherwise.”

“What about afterwards? Did you feel changed?”

“I
was
changed,” he said. “My whole
family died. I buried them with my own hands. That changes you.” He
touched the scars on his cheeks with his fingertips. “And I’m
marked. Anyone from Twilight knows immediately that I had the plague and
recovered.”

“Before you found Laenea, did you ever believe you
could communicate with people in an inexplicable way?”

Radu hesitated, but this was no time to rewrite his history
the way he wished it to be. He told van de Graaf about the hallucinations.

“And you consider this an unexceptional
childhood?”

“It wasn’t my childhood,” he said.
“It only happened a few times, just before I got sick. It may actually
have been hallucinations.”

She changed the subject abruptly. “Do you happen to
know the plague’s incubation period?”

“It’s about six weeks,” he said.
“What has that got to do with anything?”

“Oh,” she said, “probably nothing at
all.”

Before he could decide whether the offhand tone was a
deliberate attempt to distract him from his question, her eyelids flickered in
the way Radu had learned to associate with transmission by internal
communicator. He waited for the administrator to return.

The idea of being able to link up with an enormous pool of
databases intrigued Radu, but not quite enough to overcome the visceral
revulsion he felt at the idea of having a machine implanted in his brain. A
small machine, true, mostly biological and barely the size of his little
fingernail. Still he preferred not to submit to it. He suspected that if he had
been accepted for pilot’s training he would not have been able to go
through with that operation, either, even for Laenea’s sake.

The administrator opened her eyes and regarded Radu
curiously.

“Did you say you knew other people who contracted the
plague and recovered?”

“Not exactly. I said I didn’t know any but
I’m sure there must be some.”

“There aren’t.”

“… What?”

“The records don’t show any.”

“No one was thinking about keeping records.”

“True. But the census they took a couple of years
later should have found other people like you, if there were any, and it didn’t.”

“There must be some,” Radu said. “The
records must be wrong.”

Van de Graaf gazed at him speculatively, thoughtfully.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Or perhaps you really are
unique.” She stood up. “Come along.”

She took him to a small lounge where the others were already
waiting. Radu was very glad to see Orca; she was the only unambiguously
friendly person he knew right now. He trusted neither the administrators nor
the pilots. When Laenea smiled at him, he realized with distress that he was
not even certain he trusted her.

“If you’d all come with me, please,” van
de Graaf said. She had an amazing facility for giving orders with the phrasing
of requests.

She took them through secured doors toward the main body of
Earthstation. The narrow, deserted hallway exactly paralleled the main
corridors of the space station. Since returning from transit, Radu had neither
seen nor spoken to anyone who was not in some way under the control of the
transit authority. The secret hallway brought this fact to his conscious
attention: He and the others were being kept isolated.

“Did you know these halls were here?” he asked
Orca in an undertone.

“I never thought about it,” she said. “But
if I had, I would have suspected they were.”

“Why are we being kept hidden?”

“The transit administrators like publicity if
it’s completely positive. Anything that’s negative, or ambiguous,
they try to avoid. You, my friend, are definitely ambiguous.”

At the rim of the station they entered a twelve-ship shuttle
extension. The long, wide dock was eerily deserted: blocked off, Radu supposed,
from those inquisitive eyes of ambiguous publicity.

At the hatch of a shuttle, Orca stopped short.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Where are you
planning to take us?”

“Back to earth,” van de Graaf said.

“Very funny,” Orca snapped. “Landing
where?”

“White Sands.”

“I can’t land at White Sands.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have no intention of being arrested and
interned as a prisoner of war. Surely you know my family has never made peace
with the United States government?”

After a moment of incomprehension, van de Graaf said,
“Oh. I’d forgotten all about that. Surely, in an emergency —”

“No! Even if they promised me free passage I
wouldn’t believe them. Besides, I’d be in trouble with my own
people if I accepted it.”

“We all have more important things to think about than
ancient history.”

“Do you think this is some kind of joke?” Orca
said angrily. “It may be ancient history to you, but my family has an
even longer memory than the U.S. Navy — and the U.S. Navy blows us out of
the water whenever they have a chance. They still consider us traitors, if not
spies.”

“I’ll get you a world council safe-conduct on
the way down—”

“Let me explain this to you in terms you may understand,
doctor,” Orca said. “Not landing in the United States is in my
contract.”

Radu could not help it: He laughed. Van de Graaf turned
toward him, outraged, and Orca glared.

“Wait,” he said, trying to explain. He dissolved
into laughter again. “Doctor, how can you argue with her?” he said
after he managed to catch his breath. “That’s exactly the threat
you’ve been holding over me!”

Orca’s anger changed to amusement and she started
laughing, too.

“Kri, for heavens’ sake,” Ramona said.
“We can as easily land at Northwest. There’s no reason to put Orca
in a compromising position.”

“White Sands is more secure.”

Ramona snorted. “Up until now it’s been
convenient to let you administrators indulge yourselves with your passion for
secrecy, but no longer. I’ll take the responsibility and fly the shuttle
in myself, if you prefer.”

“No,” Kri said. “The responsibility is
mine. We’ll land at Northwest. But it’ll be a zoo there by the time
we get down.” She glanced at the hatch and it swung open. “Will you
all please get on board?”

They complied, entering a shuttle the likes of which Radu
had never seen. It was as opulent as Kathell Stafford’s apartment, though
not quite as gaudy. Radu’s boots sank deep into the carpet, the leather
of the seats glowed with care and polishing, and a bar stretched all the way
across the back wall of the passenger compartment.

“Is this how pilots travel?” Orca said to
Laenea.

“If it is, nobody ever told me,” Laenea said.

“Orca, you know very well we fly on the same shuttles
as everyone else.” Ramona-Teresa sat down and fastened her seat belt. She
turned toward Kri. “Or almost everyone else. Just exactly who does use
this one?”

Kri shrugged. “VIPs, usually.”

Orca laughed. “I thought pilots were the VIPs,”
she said.

“Apparently not,” Vasili Nikolaievich said.

Radu felt a little sorry for the young pilot, who had
experienced so many affronts to his pride and his self-confidence in the past
few days. This was simply one more insult, perhaps all the worse for its being,
to Radu’s mind, so trivial.

They felt a mild vibration as the ship undocked from the
space station and accelerated gently toward earth.

Orca leaned back and stretched. “That was some
day,” she said.

“Not one I’d care to repeat.” Radu slumped
down in his seat.

“We’ll probably have to, though, you
know,” she said. “Unless they found out what they wanted to about
you.”

“I don’t think they did.” He wished he
knew more about what they
had
found out about him. Van de Graaf’s
interest in Twilight’s plague troubled him deeply.

Orca grinned. “They discovered I’m not quite
human.” She laughed. “I don’t think any of the techs ever had
a diver to work on before. One of them was as nervous as a barracuda. He must
be one of those nuts who believes they can catch the carrier virus.” She
bared her prominent canine teeth, then giggled. “Just like an old movie
— zap! Transformed into a were-fish!”

Radu turned toward her, stunned by her chance remark. Orca
stopped laughing.

“Radu,” she said, “good gods, that
can’t happen. You can’t change without being sensitized, and you
can’t even be sensitized until —”

“No, no, it isn’t that,” he said.
“But you made me realize…” He stopped, suspicious, and
lowered his voice to a bare whisper. “If I told you something…
might other people be listening?”

She glanced around the shuttle. No one was paying any
attention to their conversation.

“I haven’t any reason to suspect the place is
bugged,” she said. “But I haven’t any proof it isn’t,
either, so I guess the only safe assumption is that they can listen to
us.”

“I need to talk to you. I need to tell you what I
think they want. Perhaps — if I’m lucky — you can tell me
I’m crazy. But not here.”

Orca nodded and took his hand between hers. The swimming
webs slid across his skin like warm silk.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll find a
place to talk when we get down, when we get out of here.”

The spaceport was chaos.

Radu looked through the shuttle window. The landing strip
was completely overrun. Half the people out there carried cameras, from
miniature instant-prints to recorder-transmitters with their own antennae.
Floodlights illuminated the area as brightly as day, but much more harshly.
Shadows twisted across faces; light flared off lenses and news corporation
logos.

The crowd spilled onto the runway while the shuttle was still
moving. The craft turned a few degrees toward the blockhouse, rolled a few
meters forward, stopped, pressed forward, stopped again. The wheel motors shut
down abruptly, their whine fading into silence.

Banging open the hatch between cockpit and passenger
compartment, the shuttle driver stepped through.

“Sacrificial lamb time,” she said. She sounded
as if she had seen this sort of reaction before. “Any volunteers, or do
you folks want to draw straws?”

Radu glanced out the window again. Several of the cameras
pointed upward; others followed. He realized they were photographing him.
Embarrassed, irritated, he drew back out of their range.

“No,” the driver was saying. “I
can’t get any closer to the blockhouse until the runway clears. Unless
you want some squashed pedestrians.”

“Not a bad idea,” Vasili said.

“Then you drive.”

Vasili shrugged and stayed where he was.

Ramona stood up. “They will not move until someone
speaks to them,” she said.

“Wait,” van de Graaf said. Her eyelids
flickered.

“Kri —”

She lifted one hand in the “please wait” gesture
of someone using an internal communicator.

“I’ve asked for more security,” she said
when she opened her eyes.

“Why bother?” Laenea said. “It never
works.”

“One of us must talk to the people outside,”
Ramona said again. She glanced at Vasili and Laenea. “Or we can go out
together.”

“You’re on your own,” Vasili said.

Radu had an irrational desire to punch him; what worried him
was that the recurring impulse was beginning to seem less and less irrational.

“But what should we tell them?” Laenea asked.

“The truth. There’s no reason to hide it.”
She gestured to Radu, inviting him, or commanding him, to join them.
“You, too, are part of this.”

Laenea dogged open the hatch. The crowd noise poured in. The
stairs descended slowly toward the crowd. People pressed back, opening a small
space, and one reporter leaped to catch the lowest rung and pull himself onto
it. Laenea stepped out onto the platform. Radu hesitated.

“They’re only curious,” Ramona said.

“I’ve never seen so many people at once
before,” Radu said.

He followed Ramona out onto the small upper landing.
Reporters with cameras, already halfway up the stairs, began asking questions.