Superluminal (6 page)

Public nudity never bothered Orca. She knew some people
objected, but she found their reasons absurd. She had worn nothing more
concealing than a knife belt until she was thirteen years old and taking her
first trip into the human world. It had taken her years to get used to
clothing. Even now she wore clothes more as decoration than as covering.

The elevator arrived and Orca entered the cage. She was
anxious to get to divers’ quarters. She was famished. She wanted half a
kilo of broiled salmon and some French pastries. Coming across from the
mainland, the fishing had been terrible. She had heard reports of several
shoals of fish, but they were all well off a direct course to the port.

Now that her metabolism had slowed to surface normal, Orca
felt chilly in the air conditioning. Gooseflesh hardened her nipples. She
folded her arms across her small breasts.

Ever since she had left the water, her message signal had
been glowing, a pinpoint of light just behind her eyes. Granting acceptance,
she received the messages through her internal communicator. They scrolled
across a screen she imagined in her mind, and she scanned each one quickly.

A note from a friend pleased her; junk announcements
broadcast to everyone on the port irritated her. She killed each one as soon as
she had read far enough to identify it. The people who wrote them got cleverer
and cleverer. Orca’s message bank contained a strong filter that was
meant to discard most advertising and other solicitations. Some of the
circulars had confused the program enough to make it let them through. Orca would
have to rewrite it and strengthen its criteria. The escalation never ended.

One message made her angry: “The pilot selection
committee has scheduled an appointment… ”

Oh, leave me alone, she thought without transmitting. She
signaled the message bank to kill that note, too. The administrators thought
she would make a good pilot. She was tired of declining their invitations; now
she simply ignored them. She wished she could filter them, but refusing
messages from one’s employer was not the most politic thing to do.

She was tired of being tempted. And she was tempted, she
never denied that.

Orca could be on the crew and remain a diver. She doubted,
though, that a pilot would still be capable of withstanding the physical stress
a diver needed to take. Since no diver had ever become a pilot, the
administrators could only offer Orca guesses and simulations about whether a
mechanical heart would tolerate deep dives. Their guess was that it would fail,
and Orca’s guess was that they were right. She chose to remain as she
was, and she wished they would stop trying to change her mind for her.

The elevator stopped at the divers’ floor, the doors
opened, and Orca stepped out into the foyer. The carpet was soft against her
bare toes. She fetched some clothes from the locker room, left the clothing and
her knife in an empty bedroom, and wandered down to the kitchen. A friend of
hers, a member of another diving family, sat at the table munching on a
sandwich and watching TV, an old flat-screen rerun.

“Hi, Gray.”

“Hi,” he said with his mouth full.

Orca liked Gray. He was quite beautiful, too. He was taller
than average for a diver. His eyes were pale green, and he wore his sunstreaked
brown hair unfashionably long, tied at the nape of his neck with a silver
ribbon. Orca felt a familiar and pleasant surge of sexual desire. Whenever two
families of divers met, it was the custom for the young adults to go off in a
group and play. The custom continued out here, when divers from different
families visited the spaceport.

Orca could imagine Gray’s hair fanned out against a
pillow, or drifting loose in the water.

She pulled a couple of salmon steaks out of the
refrigerator, slapped them on the grill, opened a bottle of champagne, poured
herself a mugful, and sat down. “Can I have a bite?”

Gray grinned and handed her half his sandwich.
“Anybody who would drink champagne out of a mug ought to have peanut
butter and jelly as an appetizer.”

She took a bite of his sandwich and a sip of the champagne.
“Not bad.” She offered him the mug. “Want to try it?”

He shook his head. “
Man from Atlantis
is on in
a minute.”

“Oh yeah? Which one is it?”

“The one with the giant flying octopus.”

Orca refilled her mug, flipped the salmon to grill on the
other side, and settled down to watch the ancient show. It had been filmed
before any divers existed, and it had everything wrong. Orca loved it. She had
never met a diver who did not enjoy it, except her father, who considered
watching it to be insufficiently dignified and politically incorrect. When they
projected it underwater the cousins sometimes joined in watching, but their
reaction was one of bemusement.

“He
is
pretty,” she said during a pause
in the dialogue, when Mark Harris, the hero, was persuading the giant flying
octopus not to help Mr. Schubert, the villain, take over the world, and the
giant flying octopus was sending small squeaky noises of affection toward Mark
Harris.

Orca liked the episodes in which Mr. Schubert appeared much
better than those in which the Navy demanded that Mark Harris perform some
military task, and he unquestioningly obeyed. When they were little, Orca and
her brother had made up stories in which Mark Harris told the military what it
could do with its silly plots, then swam away and conducted guerrilla warfare
against the landers until he had freed all the imprisoned cetaceans, scuttled
all the whaling ships, and mobilized public opinion to ban propeller-driven
craft so the sea regained its peace. That matched her people’s history
more closely. But even as a child she had forgiven Mark Harris for failing to
accomplish all those tasks. Unlike the real divers, he was all alone.

Orca slid her salmon off the grill onto a plate and settled
down to eat in front of the TV. She took a sip of champagne, savoring the
bubbles that sent the alcohol straight to her head.
The Man from Atlantis
was best watched slightly drunk.

“Want to sleep in my room tonight?” she said to
Gray.

“Sure,” he said, and speared a bite of her fish.

o0o

Laenea half woke, warm, warm to her center. A recent dream swam
into her consciousness and out again, leaving no trace but the memory of its
passing. She closed her eyes and relaxed, to remember it if it would come, but
she could recall only that it was a dream of piloting a ship in transit. The
details she could not perceive. Not yet. She was left with a comfortless
excitement that upset her drowsiness. Her heart purred fast and seemed to give
off heat, though that was as impossible as that it might chill her blood.

The room around her was dim. All she could tell about it was
that it was outside the hospital. The smells were neither astringent
antiseptics nor cloying drugs, but faint perfume. Silky cotton rather than
coarse synthetics surrounded her. Between her eyelashes reflections glinted
from the ceiling. She must be in Kathell’s apartment in the point
stabilizer.

She pushed herself up on her elbows. Her ribs creaked like
old parquet floors, and deep muscle aches spread from the center of her body to
her shoulders, her arms, her legs. She made a sharp sound, more surprise than
pain. She had driven herself too hard; she needed rest, not activity. She let
herself sink slowly down into the big red bed, closing her eyes and drifting
back toward sleep. She heard the rustling of two different fabrics sliding one
against the other.

“Are you all right?”

The voice would have startled her if she had not been so
nearly asleep again. She opened her eyes and found Radu standing near, his
jacket unbuttoned, a faint sheen of sweat on his bare chest and forehead. The
concern on his face matched the worry in his voice.

Laenea smiled. “You’re still here.” She
had assumed without thinking that he had gone on his way, to see and do all the
interesting things that attracted visitors on their first trip to earth.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“You could have gone…” But she wanted him
to stay.

His hand on her forehead felt cool and soothing. “I
think you have a fever. Is there someone I should call?”

Laenea thought about her body for a moment, lying still and
making herself receptive to its signals. Her heart was spinning much too fast.
She calmed and slowed it, wondering again what adventure had occurred in her
dream. Nothing else was amiss. Her lungs were clear, her hearing sharp. She
slid her hand between her breasts to touch the scar: smooth and body
temperature, no infection.

“I overtired myself,” she said.
“That’s all… ” Sleep was overtaking her again, but she
said, drowsily and curiously, “Why did you stay?”

“Because,” he said slowly, sounding very far
away, “I wanted to stay with you. I remember you…”

She wished she knew what he was talking about, but at last
sleep was the stronger lure.

o0o

Radu sat on the edge of the bed and brushed a lock of
Laenea’s hair from her forehead. She remained soundly asleep. He was glad
she had wakened, though, however briefly, for he had been getting worried.
Since Kathell’s aide brought them here, Laenea had barely moved.

Radu had barely moved, himself, since putting her to bed.
Now that he knew she would be all right, he stood and stretched. The enormous
bedroom was more than spacious enough to walk around in, but Radu wanted to let
Laenea sleep undisturbed. He opened the door. The hallway was deserted.

The apartment was so large he had to be careful to keep his
bearings. He paused before a wall of photographs: Kathell’s crippled
white tiger, signed portraits, a small airship. Her blimp’s envelope was
gold, its gondola black. It was a far cry from the patched and ancient craft
Radu used to fly on Twilight, but the picture brought back pleasant memories. That
summer, the year before the plague, had been the happiest of his life. At
fifteen he had had the responsibility for the airship for a whole season. He
had traveled all over the western continent, freer than he had ever been before
or since, even on the starship crew. He wondered if Laenea liked blimps.

He looked around the apartment for a while longer, but found
no one to talk to. Surrounded by unrelenting luxury, he felt uncomfortable. He
returned to Laenea’s room, sat near her bed, and waited.

o0o

When Laenea woke again, she woke completely. The aches and
pains had faded in the night — or in the day, for she had no idea how
long she had slept, or even how late at night or early in the morning she had
visited Kathell’s party.

She was in her favorite room in Kathell’s apartment,
one gaudier than the others. Though Laenea did not indulge in much personal
adornment, she liked the scarlet and gold of the room, its intrusive energy,
its Dionysian flavor. Even the aquaria set in the walls were inhabited by fish
gilt with scales and jeweled with luminescence. Laenea felt the honest glee of
compelling shapes and colors. She sat up and threw off the blankets, stretching
and yawning in pure animal pleasure. Then, seeing Radu asleep, sprawled in the
red velvet pillow chair, she fell silent, surprised, not wishing to wake him.
She slipped quietly out of bed, pulled a robe from the closet, and padded into
the bathroom.

After she had bathed, she felt comfortable and able to
breathe properly for the first time since her operation. She had removed the
strapping in order to shower, and as her cracked ribs hurt no more free than
bandaged, she did not bother to replace the tape.

Back in the bedroom, Radu was awake.

“Good morning.”

“It’s not quite midnight,” he said,
smiling.

“Of what day?”

“You slept what was left of last night and all
today.”

“Where’s Kathell?”

“I don’t know. Her party was being packed up to
go somewhere else. She said you were to stay here as long as you liked.”

Laenea knew people who would have done almost anything for
Kathell, yet she knew no one of whom Kathell had ever asked a favor. This
puzzled her.

“How in the world did you get me here? Did I
walk?”

“We didn’t want to wake you. We cleared one of
the large serving carts and lifted you onto it and pushed you here.”

Laenea laughed. “You should have folded a flower in my
hands and pretended you were at a wake.”

“Someone did make that suggestion.”

“I wish I hadn’t been asleep — I would
have liked to see the expressions of the grounders when we passed.”

“Your being awake would have spoiled the
illusion,” Radu said.

Laenea laughed again, and this time he joined her.

As usual, clothes of all styles and sizes hung in the large
closets. Laenea ran her hand across a row of garments, stopping when she
touched a pleasurable texture. The first shirt she found near her size was deep
green velvet with bloused sleeves. She slipped it on and buttoned it up to her
breastbone.

“I still owe you a restaurant meal,” she said to
Radu.

“You owe me nothing at all,” he said, much too
seriously.

She buckled her belt with a jerk and shoved her feet into
her boots, annoyed. “You don’t even know me, but you stayed with me
and took care of me for the whole first day of your first trip to earth.
Don’t you think I should — don’t you think it would be
friendly for me to give you a meal?” She glared at him.
“Willingly?”

He hesitated, startled by her anger. “I would find
great pleasure,” he said slowly, “in accepting that gift.” He
met Laenea’s gaze, and when it softened he smiled again. Laenea’s
exasperation melted and flowed away.

“Come along, then,” she said to him for the
second time. He rose from the pillow chair, quickly and awkwardly. None of
Kathell’s furniture was designed for a person his height or
Laenea’s. She reached to help him; they joined hands.