Superluminal (8 page)

“I overcharge tourists,” Marc said, the
artificial voice so smooth that it was impossible to know if he spoke cynically
or sardonically or if he were simply joking.

“I don’t know where I’m going next,”
Laenea told him, “but are you looking for anything?”

“Nothing in particular,” he said. “Pretty
things…” Silver swirled across the air, like a miniature snowstorm
falling from a cloudless sky.

“I know.”

The corridors dazzled Laenea after the dim restaurant; she
wished for a gentle evening and moonlight. Between cold metal walls, she and
Radu walked close together, warm, arms around each other. “Marc
collects,” Laenea said. “We all bring him things.”

“‘Pretty things.’ ”

“Yes… I think he tries to bring the nicest bits
of all the worlds inside with him. I think he creates his own reality.”

“One that has nothing to do with ours.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s what they’d do at the
hospital,” Radu said. “Isolate you, and you disagree that that
would be valuable.”

“Not for me. For Marc, perhaps.”

He nodded. “And… now?”

“Back to Kathell’s, for a while at least.”
She reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. His hair tickled her hand.
“The rule I disagreed with most was the one that forbade any sex while I
was in training.”

The smile lines appeared again, bracketing his mouth
parallel to his drooping mustache, crinkling the skin around his eyes. “I
understand entirely,” he said, “why you aren’t anxious to go
back.”

o0o

Entering her room in Kathell’s suite, Laenea turned on
the lights. Mirrors reflected the glow, bright niches among red plush and gold
trim. She and Radu stood together on the silver surfaces, hands clasped, for a
moment as hesitant as children. Then Laenea turned to Radu, and he to her; they
ignored the actions of the mirror figures. Laenea’s hands on the sides of
Radu’s face touched his scarred cheeks; she kissed him once, lightly,
again, harder. His mustache was soft and bristly against her lips and her
tongue. His hands tightened over her shoulder blades, and moved down. He held
her gently. She slipped one hand between their bodies, beneath his jacket,
stroking his bare skin, tracing the taut muscles of his back, his waist, his
hip. His breathing quickened.

At the beginning nothing was different — but nothing
was the same. The change was more important than motions, position, endearments;
Laenea had experienced those in all their combinations, content with
involvement for a few moments’ pleasure. That had always been satisfying
and sufficient; she had never suspected the potential for evolution that
depended on the partners. Leaning over Radu, with her hair curling down around
their faces, looking into his smiling blue eyes, she felt close enough to him
to absorb his thoughts and sense his soul. They caressed each other leisurely.
Laenea’s nipples hardened, but instead of throbbing they tingled. Radu
moved against her and her excitement heightened suddenly, irrationally,
grasping her, shaking her. She gasped but could not force the breath back out.
Radu kissed her shoulder, the base of her throat, stroked her stomach, drew his
hand up her side, cupped her breasts.

“Radu —”

Her climax was sudden and violent, a wave contracting all
through her as her single thrust pushed Radu’s hips down against the
mattress. He was startled into a climax of his own as Laenea shuddered
involuntarily, straining against him, clasping him to her, unable to catch his
rhythm. But neither of them cared.

They lay together, panting and sweaty.

“Is that part of it?” His voice was unsteady.

“I guess so.” Her voice, too, showed the effects
of surprise. “No wonder they’re so quiet about it.”

“Does it — is your pleasure decreased?” He
was ready to be angry for her.

“No, that isn’t it, it’s —” She
started to say that the pleasure was tenfold greater, but remembered the start
of their loveplay, before she had been made aware of just how many of her
rhythms were rearranged. The beginning had nothing to do with the fact that she
was a pilot. “It was fine.” A lame adjective. “Just
unexpected. And you?”

He smiled. “As you say — unexpected. Surprising.
A little… frightening.”

“Frightening?”

“All new experiences are a little frightening. Even
the very enjoyable ones. Or maybe those most of all.”

Laenea laughed softly.

Laenea and Radu dozed, wrapped in each other’s arms.
Laenea’s hair curled around to touch the corner of Radu’s jaw, and
her heel was hooked over his calf. She was content for the moment with silence,
stillness, touch. The plague had not scarred his body.

In the aquaria, the fish flitted back and forth beneath dim
lights, spreading blue shadows across the bed. Laenea breathed deeply, counting
to make the breaths even. Breathing is a response, not a rhythm, a reaction to
the build-up of carbon dioxide in blood and brain. Laenea’s breathing had
to be altered only during transit itself. For now she used it as an artificial
rhythm of concentration. Her heart raced with excitement and adrenaline, so she
began to slow it, to relax. But something disturbed her control. Her blood
pressure slid down slightly, then slid slowly up to a dangerous level. She
could hear only the dull ringing in her ears. Perspiration formed on her
forehead, in her armpits, along her spine. Her heart had never before failed to
respond to conscious control.

Angry, startled, she pushed herself up, flinging back her
hair. Radu raised his head, tightening his hand around the point of her
shoulder. “What —?”

He might as well have been speaking underwater. Laenea
lifted her hand to silence him.

One deep inhalation, hold; exhale, hold. She repeated the
sequence, calming herself, relaxing the voluntary muscles. Her hand fell to the
bed. She lay back. Repeat the sequence, and again. Again. In the hospital and
since, her control over involuntary muscles had been quick and sure. She began
to be afraid, and had to imagine the fear evaporating, dissipating. Finally the
arterial muscles began to respond. They lengthened, loosened, expanded. Last,
the pump answered her commands, as she recaptured and reproduced the
indefinable states of self-control.

When she knew her blood pressure was no longer likely to
crush her kidneys or mash her brain, she opened her eyes. Above her, Radu
watched, deep lines of worry across his forehead. “Are you —”
He was whispering.

She lifted her heavy hand and stroked his face, his
eyebrows, his hair. “I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t
get control for a minute. But I have it back now.” She drew his hand
across her body, pulling him down beside her, and soon they fell asleep.

o0o

Later, Laenea took time to consider her situation. Returning
to the hospital would be easiest; it was also the least attractive alternative.
Remaining free, adjusting without interference to the changes, meeting the
other pilots, showing Radu what was to be seen: Outwitting the administrators
would be more fun. Kathell had done her a great favor, for without her
apartment Laenea would have rented a hotel room. The records would somehow have
been made available; a polite messenger would have appeared to ask her
respectfully to come along. Should she overpower an innocent hireling and
disappear laughing? More likely she would have shrugged and gone. Fights had
never given her either excitement or pleasure. She knew what things she would
not do, ever, though she did not know what she would do now. She pondered.

“Damn them,” she said.

Radu sat down facing her. The couches, of course, were both
too low. Radu and Laenea looked at each other across their knees. They both
wore caftans, whose colors clashed violently. Radu lay back on the cushions,
chuckling. “You look much too undignified for anger.”

She leaned toward him and tickled a sensitive place she had
discovered. “I’ll show you undignified —” He twisted
away and batted at her hand, but missed, laughing helplessly. When Laenea
relented, she was lying on top of him on the wide, soft couch. Radu unwound
from a defensive crouch, watching her warily, laugh lines deep around his eyes
and mouth.

“Peace,” she said, and held up her hands. He
relaxed. Laenea picked up a fold of the material of her caftan and compared it
with one of his. “Is anything more undignified than the two of us in
colors no hallucination would have — and giggling as well?”

“Nothing at all.” He touched her hair, her face.
“But what made you so angry?”

“The administrators — their red tape. Their
infernal tests.” She laughed again, this time bitterly. “‘Undignified’
— some of those tests would win on that.”

“Aren’t they necessary? For your health?”

She told him about the hypnotics, the sedatives, the sleep,
the time she had spent being obedient. “Their redundancies have
redundancies. If I weren’t healthy I’d be out on the street wearing
my old heart. I’d be nothing.”

“Never that.”

But she knew of people who had failed as pilots, who were
reimplanted with their own saved hearts, and none of them had ever flown again,
as pilots, as crew, as passengers.

“Nothing.”

He was shaken by her vehemence. “But you’re all
right. You’re who you want to be and what you want to be.”

“I’m angry at inconvenience,” she
admitted. “I want to be the one who shows earth to you. They want me to
spend the next month shuttling from one testing machine to another. And
I’ll have to, if they find me. My freedom’s limited.” She
felt very strongly that she needed to spend the next month in the real world,
neither hampered by experts who knew, truly, nothing, nor misdirected by
controlled environments. She did not know how to explain the feeling; she
thought it might be one of the things pilots tried to talk about during their
hesitant, unsyncopated conversations with their insufficient vocabularies.
“Yours isn’t, though, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes I come back to earth and never leave the
port. It’s my home. It has everything I want or need. I can easily stay a
month and never have to admit receiving a message I don’t want.”
Her fingertips moved back and forth across the ridge of new tissue over her
breastbone. Somehow it was a comfort, though the scar was a symbol of what had
cut her off from her old friends. She needed new friends now, but she felt it
would be stupid and unfair to ask Radu to spend his first trip to earth on an
artificial island. “I have to stay here. But you don’t. Earth has a
lot of sights worth seeing.”

He did not answer. Laenea raised her head to look at him. He
was intent and disturbed.

“Would you be offended,” he said, “if I
told you I am not very interested in historical sights?”

“Is that what you really want? To stay with me?”

“Yes. Very much.”

o0o

Laenea led Radu through the vast apartment to the lowest
floor. There, flagstones surrounded a swimming pool formed of intricate mosaic
that shimmered in the dim light. This was a grotto, more than a place for
athletic events or children’s noisy beachball games.

Radu sighed; Laenea brushed her hand across the top of his
shoulder, questioning.

“Someone spent a great deal of time and care
here,” he said.

“That’s true.” Laenea had never thought of
it as the work of someone’s hands, individual and painstaking, though of
course it was exactly that. But the economic structure of her world was based
on service, not production, and she had always taken the results for granted.

They took off their caftans and waded down the steps into
body-warm water. It rose smooth and soothing around the persistent soreness of
Laenea’s ribs.

“I’m going to soak for a while.” She lay
back and floated, her hair drifting out, a strand occasionally curling back to
brush her shoulder, the top of her spine. Radu’s voice rumbled through
the water, incomprehensible, but she glanced over and saw him waving toward the
dim end of the pool. He flopped down in the water and thrashed energetically away,
retreating to a constant background noise. All sounds faded, gaining the same
faraway quality, like audio slow motion. She urged the tension out of her body
through her shoulders, down her outstretched arms, out the tips of spread
fingers.

Radu finished his circumnavigation of the pool; he dove
under her and the turbulence stroked her back. Laenea let her feet sink to the
pool’s bottom. She stood up as Radu burst out of the water, a very
amateur dolphin, laughing, hair dripping in his eyes. They waded toward each
other through the chest-deep water, and embraced. Radu kissed Laenea’s
throat just at the corner of her jaw. She threw her head back like a cat
stretching to prolong the pleasure, moving her hands up and down his sides.

“We’re lucky to be here so early,” he said
softly, “alone before anyone else comes.”

“I don’t think anyone else is staying at
Kathell’s right now,” Laenea said. “We have the pool to
ourselves all the time.”

“No one else at all lives here?”

“No, of course not. Kathell doesn’t even live
here most of the time. She just has it kept ready for when she wants it.”

He said nothing, embarrassed by his error.

“Never mind,” Laenea said. “It’s a
natural mistake to make.” But it was not, of course, on earth.

o0o

Laenea had visited enough new worlds to understand how Radu
might be uncomfortable in the midst of the private possessions and personal
services available on earth. What impressed him was expenditure of time, for
time was the valuable commodity in his frame of reference. On Twilight everyone
would have two or three necessary jobs, and none would consist of piecing
together intricate mosaics. Everything was different on earth.

They paddled in the shallow end of the pool, reclined on the
steps, flicked shining spray at each other. Laenea wanted Radu again. She was
completely free of pain for the first time since the operation. That fact began
to overcome a certain reluctance she felt, an ambivalence toward her own
reactions. The violent change in her sexual responses disturbed her more than she
wanted to admit.