Superluminal (5 page)

“Let’s walk to the point.” Laenea had been
enclosed in testing and training rooms and hospitals as he had been confined in
ships and quarantine: She, too, felt the need for fresh air and rain and the
ocean’s silent words.

The sidewalk followed the edge of the port. A rail separated
it from a drop of ten meters to the sea. Incipient waves caressed the metal
cliff obliquely and slid away into the darkness. Laenea and Radu walked slowly
along, matching strides. Every few paces their hips brushed together. Laenea
glanced at Radu occasionally and wondered how she could have thought him
anything but beautiful. Her heart circled slowly in her breast, low pitched,
relaxing, and her perceptions faded from fever clarity to misty dark and
soothing. A veil seemed to surround and protect her. She became aware that Radu
was gazing at her, more than she watched him. The cold touched them through the
cloak, and they moved closer together; it seemed only sensible for Radu to put
his arm around her, too, and so they walked, clasped together.

“Real work,” Laenea said thoughtfully.

“Yes… hard work, with hands or mind.” He
picked up the second possible branch of their previous conversation without
hesitation. “We do the work ourselves. Twilight is too new for machines
— they evolved here, and they aren’t as adaptable as people.”

Laenea, who had endured unpleasant situations in which
machines did not perform as intended, understood what he meant. Methods older
than automation were more economical on new worlds where the machines had to be
designed from the beginning but people only had to learn. Evolution was as good
an analogy as any.

“Crewing’s work. Maybe it doesn’t strain your
muscles, but it is work.”

“One never gets tired. Physically or mentally. The job
has no challenges.”

“Aren’t the risks enough for you?”

“Not random risks,” he said. “It’s
like gambling.” His background made him a harsh judge, harshest with
himself.

“It isn’t slave labor, you know. You could quit
and go home.”

“I wanted to come —” He cut off the
protest. “I thought it would be different.”

“I know,” Laenea said. “You think it will
always be exciting, but after a while all that’s left is a dull kind of
danger.”

“I did want to visit other places. To be like —
in that I was selfish.”

“Ahh, stop. Selfish? No one would do it
otherwise.”

“Perhaps not. But I had a different vision. I
remembered…” Again he stopped himself in midsentence.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.” All his edges
hardened again. “We spend most of our time carrying trivial cargoes for
trivial reasons to trivial people.”

“The trivial cargoes pay for the emergencies,”
Laenea said.

“That isn’t true!” Radu said sharply,
then, in a more moderate tone, “The transit authority allows its
equipment to be used for emergencies, but they’re paid for it, never
doubt that.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Laenea said.
“But that’s the way it’s always been.”

“It isn’t right,” he said. “On
Twilight…” He went no further.

“You’re drawn back,” Laenea said.
“More than anyone I’ve known before. It must be a comfort to love a
place so much.”

At first he tensed, as if he were afraid she would mock or
chide him for weakness, or laugh at him. When, instead, she smiled, his wariness
decreased. “I feel better, after flights when I dream about home.”

If Laenea had still been crew she would have envied him his
dreams.

“Is it your family you miss?”

“I have no family — I still miss them sometimes,
but they’re gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t know,” he said quickly,
almost too quickly, as though he might have hurt her rather than the other way
around. “The epidemic killed them.”

Laenea tightened her arm around his shoulder in silent
comfort. She regretted her thoughtless question. She should have expected that
Radu had lost family and friends during Twilight’s plague.

“I don’t know what it is about Twilight that
binds us all,” Radu said. “I suppose it must be the combination
— the challenge and the result. Everything is new. We try to touch the
world gently. So many things could go wrong.”

He glanced at her, the blue of his eyes deep as a mountain
lake, his face solemn in its strength, asking without words a question Laenea
did not understand.

They walked for a while in silence.

The cold air entered Laenea’s lungs and spread through
her chest, her belly, arms, legs… she imagined that the machine was cold
metal, sucking the heat from her as it circled in its silent patterns. She was
tired.

“What’s that?”

She glanced up. They were near the midpoint of the
port’s edge, approaching lights that shone vaguely through the fog. The
amorphous pink glow resolved itself into separate globes and torches. Laenea
noticed a high metallic hum. Within two paces the air cleared.

The tall frames of fog-catchers reared up in concentric
circles that led inward to the lights. Touched by the wind, the long wires
vibrated. Touched by the wires, the fog condensed. Water dripped from
wires’ tips to the platform. The intermittent sound of heavy drops on metal,
like rain, provided irregular rhythm for the faint music.

“Just a party,” Laenea said. The singing,
glistening wires formed a multilayered curtain, each layer transparent but in
combination translucent and shimmering. Laenea moved between them, but Radu,
hanging back, slowed her.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t wish to go where I haven’t been
invited.”

“You are invited. We’re all invited. Would you
stay away from a party at your own house?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Laenea remembered her own days as a novice on the crew.
Becoming used to one’s new status took time.

“They come to the port because of us,” Laenea
said. “They come hoping we’ll stop and talk to them, and eat their
food and drink their liquor.” She gestured — it was meant to be a
sweeping movement, but she stopped her hand before the apex of its arc,
flinching at the strain on her cracked ribs — toward the party, lights
and tables, a tasseled pavilion, the fog-catchers, the people in evening
costume, the servants and machines. “Why else come here? Why else bring
all this here? They could be on a tropical island or under the redwoods. They
could be on a mountaintop or on a desert at dawn. But this is where
they’ve chosen to be, and I assure you they’ll welcome us.”

“You know the customs,” Radu said, if a little
doubtfully. When they passed the last ring of fog-catchers the temperature
began to rise. The warmth was a great relief. Laenea let the damp velvet cape
fall away from her shoulders, and Radu did the same. A very young man, still a
boy really, smoothcheeked and wide-eyed, approached and offered to take the
cloak. He saw the tip of the scar between Laenea’s breasts and stared at
her in curiosity and admiration. “Pilot…” he said.
“Welcome, pilot.”

“Thank you. Whose gathering is this?”

The boy, now speechless, glanced over his shoulder and
gestured.

Kathell Stafford glided toward them, followed by her white
tiger.

Gray streaked Kathell’s hair, like the silver thread
woven into her silk gown. Veins glowed blue beneath her light brown skin.

“I’m flattered that you came,” she said.
“I heard you were in training.”

Laenea heard in Kathell’s voice the same tone that had
been in the shopkeeper’s, a note of awe and deference. She grasped
Kathell’s hands.

“I’m just the same,” she said. “I
haven’t changed.”

Kathell’s tiny, fragile hands trembled in
Laenea’s strong grip.

“But you have,” she said. “You’re a
pilot now.”

Discomforted, Laenea let her go.

The other guests, quick to sense novelty, drifted nearer as
if they had no particular direction in mind. Laenea had seen all the ways of
approaching crew or pilots: the shyness or bravado or undisguised awe of
children; the unctuous familiarity of some adults; the sophisticated
nonchalance of the rich.

Laenea recognized few of the people clustering behind Kathell.
She stood looking out at them, down a bit on most, and she almost wished she
had led Radu around the fog- catchers instead of between them. She did not feel
ready for the effusive greetings offered pilots; they were, for Laenea, as yet
unearned. The guests outshone her in every way, in beauty, in dress, in
knowledge; yet they wanted her, they needed her, to touch what was denied them.

She could see the passage of time, one second after another,
that quickly, in their faces. Quite suddenly she was overcome by pity.

Kathell introduced them all to her. Laenea would not
remember one name in ten. Radu stood alone, slightly separated from her by the
crowd, half a head taller than any of the others. Someone handed Laenea a glass
of champagne. People clustered around her, waiting for her to talk. She found
that she had no more to say to them than to those she left behind in the crew.
She smiled, doubting that the expression masked her unease.

A man came up to her and shook her hand. “I’ve
always wanted to meet an Aztec…”

His voice trailed off at Laenea’s frown. She did not
want to be churlish, so she put aside her annoyance. “Just
‘pilot,’ please.”

“But Aztecs —”

“The Aztecs sacrificed their captives’
hearts,” Laenea said. “We aren’t captives, and we certainly
don’t feel we’ve made a sacrifice.”

She turned away, ending the conversation before he could
press forward with a witty comment. Laenea shivered and wished away the dense
crowd of rich, free, trapped human beings. She wanted quiet and solitude.

Suddenly Radu was near. Laenea grasped his outstretched
hand. He said something to Kathell, which the ringing in Laenea’s ears
blocked out. Kathell nodded and led the way through the crowd. The guests
parted like water for Kathell. For Kathell and her tiger, but Kathell was in
front. Laenea and Radu followed in her wake. They moved through regions of
fragrances: mint, carnation, pine, musk, orange blossom. The boundaries were
sharp between the odors.

They entered the pavilion. Radu pulled the front flap closed
before anyone else could follow. Laenea immediately felt warmer. The
temperature was probably the same outside in the open party, but the luminous
tent walls made her feel enclosed and protected from the cold vast currents of
the sea.

She sat gratefully in a soft chair. The white tiger laid his
chin on her knee and she stroked his huge head.

Kathell took the empty champagne glass and gave Laenea a
different drink. Laenea sipped it: warm milk punch. A hint that she should be
in bed.

“I just got out of the hospital,” she said.
“I guess I overdid it a little. I’m not used to —” She
gestured with her free hand, meaning: everything. My new body, being outside
and free again, Radu. Her vision began to blur, so she closed her eyes.

“Stay awhile,” Kathell said.

Laenea did not try to answer; she was too comfortable, too
sleepy. She slowed her heart and relaxed the arterial constricting muscles.
Blood flowing through the dilated capillaries made her blush, and she felt
warmer.

Laenea thought Kathell said more, but the words drowned in
the murmur of muffled voices, wind, and sea. She felt only the softness of the
cushions beneath her, the warm fragrant air, and the fur of the white tiger.

Time passed, how much or at what rate Laenea had no idea.
She slept gratefully and unafraid, deeply, dreaming, and hardly roused when she
was moved. She muttered something and was reassured, but never remembered the
words, only the tone. Wind and cold touched her and were shut out. She felt a
slight acceleration. Then she slept again.

o0o

Orca felt tired after the long swim from Harmony to the
spaceport. She swam into the ferry dock, pausing where water and air and the
metal ramp intersected. The air world began to come back to her. Her metabolism
slowed and she felt chilly. She never noticed the cold, deep in the sea.

She stood and shook the water from her short, pale hair. She
had arrived just ahead of a ferry. Its sails furled softly and its hull sighed
as it settled lower in the water. Orca hurried toward the deck. Swimmers, even
divers, were not supposed to come on board this way, but her people used the
pier as if it had been built for them. They stayed out of the way of arriving
and departing ferries, but that was only common sense.

Whenever the port authorities roused themselves to complain,
the divers’ council renewed its application to build an underwater
hatchway in their quarters in the stabilizer shaft. The fight over the permits
had been going on for years. For herself, Orca ignored the dispute and came on
board whatever way was most convenient at the time, whether it was ferry dock
or access ladder or a fishing pier’s elevator.

The afternoon breeze slapped small waves against the sides
of the port and dried the droplets of water clinging to the fine hair on
Orca’s arms and legs. She stretched, spreading her webbed hands to the
sun.

She was well clear of the ramp by the time the ferry eased
away. Naked and barefoot she padded into the blockhouse and pushed the button
for the elevator. It was midafternoon, so quite a few people were around. Port
workers and other crew members found the sight of an unclothed diver
unremarkable, but some of the tourists stopped and stared. Orca ignored them.
The only way to get from the surface of the port to divers’ quarters was
to use the elevator, and the only way to get to the elevator was to cross areas
frequented by the public. Orca was not about to wear a wet suit, or anything
else, on a long-distance swim. For a diver, the idea was ridiculous.

Sometimes a tourist complained to the port authority, and the
port authority complained to the divers’ council. The council considered
the objection gravely — and renewed the application for the underwater
entrance. By this time, the sequence was practically a game.