Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  o0o

  Radu sat bolt upright, wide awake, his hands flung out before him.

  He blinked slowly, bringing himself back to the crew room. Shivering, he slumped against the wall and stared back at the two pilots who stood in the doorway staring at him.

  “Did you call out to me?” he said stupidly.

  “No,” Ramona-Teresa said, “you cried out to us.”

  “We’re near the end of the flight path, we don’t have anywhere to go but back to the beginning or out into normal space,” Vasili said.

  Radu’s absurd mental clock lurched and chirped and told him he had been asleep nearly as long as he had walked in the dream. Relating dream time to real time, or time as real as time ever got in transit, he would just be turning onto the sixth track, the longest one.

  “Just keep going.”

  “How far?”

  Radu shrugged.

  Vasili scowled and stalked away.

  Chapter 10

  In the control room, Radu tried to tell the pilots about his dream. He started twice, and stopped twice, unable to find the right words. He tried again, fumbling to express concepts for which he had no language.

  “I was walking on a path,” he said. “It was very precise. Each turning was a right angle, but…” He hesitated, certain Vasili and Ramona would laugh at him. “Every time I started on a new path, I thought it was perpendicular to all the others. I never climbed, the ground was very flat —” He stopped again. He was not conveying information, only his own tension and confusion, and that was no way to make the pilots believe him. Besides, he knew better than anyone that dreams were images. What he needed to do was understand what the images meant. “That happened for six segments. But when I got to the turning, at the seventh, I heard Laenea. That’s when I woke up,” he said lamely.

  Neither pilot spoke. Vasili had turned translucently pale. He looked over at Ramona. The older pilot gazed at Radu, her serenity shaken by a hint of shock. She bent her head down, pinching the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger as if she felt very weary.

  “I could have misinterpreted the extra directions,” Radu said in a rush.

  “Not directions,” Ramona-Teresa said, “dimensions.”

  “Seven of them?”

  “Seven spatial dimensions in theory, six in practice, until now.”

  “Seventh doesn’t exist, Ramona,” Vasili said.

  Ramona managed to smile. “True,” she said, “nor will it until someone perceives it.”

  “That’s a lot of philosophical bullshit, if it were there one of us would have found it, I’ve looked for it hard enough.”

  “Ah,” Ramona said, “you’ve detected a flaw in the proof?”

  Vasili glowered at her. “Proofs are boring.”

  Ramona laughed. “This is hard on your pride, it is on mine, too, believe me.”

  “What difference does it make?” Radu said desperately. “It isn’t another dimension we’re looking for — it’s Laenea’s ship.”

  “He doesn’t even understand what this means,” Vasili said to Ramona, in disgust.

  “If we find the lost ship? I think I do,” Radu said.

  “Not the lost ship — seventh.”

  Radu frowned.

  “You can navigate our galaxy with four,” Vasili said, “people who perceive four are easy to find, those of us who see fifth and sixth are a little rarer, and we don’t much matter anyway because sixth only reaches empty intergalactic space — it’s seventh that will open up the universe.”

  “We haven’t even finished exploring the systems in easy reach,” Radu said. “What’s the difference if we can get to Andromeda, or only halfway?”

  “We’d be unlimited — we could follow the history of a quasar, experimental physics can catch up to the theory, the possibilities are unimaginable.” Vasili turned slowly toward the viewport. “And maybe we’ll even figure out just exactly what it is we’re doing in here.”

  “All right,” Radu said softly to Vasili’s back. He knew he should be excited by the idea of a tremendous gain in knowledge, but it only made him feel weary and overwhelmed. “All right,” he said. “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t, you really don’t,” Vasili said without looking at him, “and it’s all coincidence anyway.”

  “Truly?” Ramona said. She watched Vasili while she breathed from her mask. He looked at her, looked away, and fidgeted. “You’re willing to make yourself believe that, for your pride?”

  Vasili put his own breathing mask over his face and slumped down in sulky silence.

  “What you just described,” Ramona said to Radu, “was a fair representation of the plan for a first training flight, in which the teacher takes the new pilot along the intersection of the hyperplane with one dimension at a time.” She took a breath. “First you orient the new pilot with the normal three, then you introduce fourth, and fifth and sixth if they can perceive them.” She paused to let that sink in. “As far as I can tell — assuming the usual progression, and relating your perception of time to mine of distance — you’ve given an accurate tracing of the path we’ve been following.”

  “I…” Radu shook his head.

  “Yes,” Ramona said, “it’s a lot for us to accept, too.”

  “So what?” Vasili said, gesturing toward the viewport. “Can he look out there and show us where to go, to find seventh?” His tone was belligerent. “Can you even perceive fourth?”

  “No,” Radu said. “I can’t see anything at all.”

  “We’re still following their flight plan, but we’re near the point where they should have turned back to the start, so what do we do when we get there?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Radu said. “Please don’t turn the ship. It isn’t time.”

  “Time doesn’t mean anything in transit!” Vasili shouted.

  “It does to me,” Radu said gently.

  “Vaska,” Ramona said, “that is enough, you agreed to come, but we aren’t so far from home that we can’t return and start the search over.”

  “You need the best pilot you can get,” Vasili said sullenly.

  “That’s true, but I’m wondering if we have you at all.” She paused, and Vasili shifted uncomfortably. “You aren’t so much better that this flight would be out of the question with Chase, or Jenneth, or even me at the controls.”

  “We can’t go back now,” Radu said. “I don’t care what he says to me, as long as he’ll try to follow what I think I’ve found out.”

  “I would — if you’d only decide what it is!”

  “Keep going,” Radu said. “Just keep going.”

  o0o

  Between the long wait and being so near the pilots, Radu found it difficult to remain calm. Until now his fragile belief in a perception he did not understand had been a desperate attempt to fend off reality, the reality of Laenea’s death. Now that the perception had connected itself so neatly to something concrete, it was becoming reality itself. The scene in the viewport remained, for Radu, a plain gray fog. He was so bored by it that the imaginary flashes of color increased in intensity. He folded his arms across his chest and slumped against the wall. He wished that if he were going to hallucinate, he would do it in an interesting manner.

  Vasili had left the control room for a few minutes; Radu sat in the pilot’s chair beside Ramona.

  “Is the ship, right now, traveling through six spatial dimensions?”

  “Yes,” Ramona said, “ordinarily Vasili would be piloting the ship freely within a multidimensional space, usually a hypercube.” She paused to breathe. “But as we’re following a training run, at the moment we’re proceeding along the intersection of the fifth- and sixth-dimensional hyperplanes.”

  Radu tried to imagine it, and failed. “I don’t see how you can even begin to handle all the variables.”

  “In two ways — mathematically, by approximation, by representing the hyperplanes as a combination of two-dimensional spaces, the way most of us do it.�
��

  “And the other way?”

  “By conceptual purity.”

  “What?”

  Ramona smiled at his expression of confusion. “Have you ever known someone who can always prove mathematical theorems, but who skips so many steps that no one else can understand their proofs?”

  Radu nodded.

  “They make an art of science, they make jumps of intuition that the rest of us can’t follow: Vaska is like that.”

  “I’m not, though. It doesn’t seem strange to me that I can’t do it. But transit’s out there, right in front of me. Why can’t I see it?”

  “I believe the question is not why you don’t perceive it, but why we do, which no one has ever explained.”

  Radu shook his head.

  “Does everything look the same to you, inside the ship?” Ramona asked.

  Radu nodded. “Not to you?”

  “Far from it, here, and back home we perceive what’s called a shadow change; one must block it deliberately most of the time, or it overloads you.”

  Block it deliberately? Radu thought.

  He realized that Vasili was standing to one side of him. He got up quickly. The younger pilot sat down in his seat without acknowledging him.

  “We’re well past where Miikala and Laenea should have turned back,” he said, “is this familiar territory to you, Ramona?”

  “No, I’ve not been far on this track.”

  “Nor have I — I must take a bearing, if I don’t there’s no telling where we’ll come out, and there are a lot of anomalies in this region; I’m worried about the perturbations.”

  “We’ve got to keep going,” Radu said. “We’re nearly there.”

  “What’s the point of going there — wherever there is — if we can’t get back?”

  “How can we be getting lost already? We haven’t been out that long.” Their expressions changed and Radu wanted to scream with frustration. “I know! I know it doesn’t mean anything to you, but it’s true nonetheless!”

  “I told you he didn’t understand about seventh,” Vasili said.

  “Each successive spatial dimension gives the ship an exponential increase in range,” Ramona said patiently to Radu, “so it’s possible to go a very short distance in transit, but a very long way in normal space, particularly when you’ve moved up to sixth.”

  “Oh,” Radu said. “But — just a little farther?”

  Ramona sighed. “We’d best do as he asks, Vaska.”

  “I won’t take orders from a crew member!” Vasili fumbled for his oxygen mask and took a long deep breath.

  “Can you return us exactly to this spot, going the same direction and the same speed?” Radu asked.

  “I was under the impression that was what I was here for.”

  “All right.”

  The acquiescence was so sudden that Vasili looked confused.

  “You have your wish, Vasili Nikolaievich,” Ramona-Teresa said; “take us out of transit.”

  Vasili settled in at his controls. A moment later the gray of the viewport glowed to black. Each pilot took a deep breath and resumed a relatively normal pattern of breathing. Radu stopped his count of the seconds they had spent on the sixth track. He had so many different time-lines going together in his mind that he wondered if he were in danger of losing them all.

  He looked outside, and gasped.

  The ship lay close to the fiery disk of a forming star, so close it could be engulfed at any moment, so close Radu could see rivers and points of brilliant color in the great burning spinning central sphere —

  He glanced at Vasili, at Ramona. The younger pilot looked irritated, the older bemused, but they were quite calm. Still alarmed, Radu turned back to the port.

  Perspective jolted him. It was not a single coalescing star that lay below the ship. His eyes had tricked him, following color to create motion. What he was looking at did indeed spin, at an enormous speed. But it was itself so enormous that its motion would be imperceptible if Radu watched it for his lifetime.

  Feeling dizzy, he gazed down at the Milky Way. Its filmy, fuzzy edge crossed the port at a diagonal.

  Ramona made a sound of mild surprise. “We have come a long way. Vaska, can you mark our position?”

  “I think so, here, with the x team’s computer. But just how much farther are we supposed to go?”

  They both glanced at Radu, without asking the question that was unaskable about transit.

  “About ten minutes, subjective time,” he said. “But that won’t match the clock. Do you want me to plan to give you a countdown?”

  “Good gods, no! Haven’t you learned anything about pilots?”

  “I’m sorry,” Radu said, startled by the vehemence of Vasili’s reply.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you but Ramona and I would like to get home from this alive.”

  “Vaska,” Ramona said, “he’s done nothing to upset your balance. He will not. So stop harrying him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Radu said again. “I didn’t realize just how careful you have to be.”

  “We’re generally a bit more resilient,” Ramona said. “But you put us under an extra strain, as we do you.” She rubbed her hand along the side of her face, and closed her eyes she looked as if exhaustion were about to overcome her.

  Radu took the hint and left the control room.

  He stopped near Orca’s sleep chamber and sat beside her. The anesthetic was supposed to be relaxing, but Orca’s teeth were clenched. He could see the muscles in a band down the side of her jaw, and the tendons standing out in her neck. She moved, shifting as if to wake.

  He wished he could wake her and talk to her. But the wish was too selfish to indulge. He was worried about the delay, and he hoped the pilots would not be long at their task. It would be unfair to Orca to wake her; she would hardly be out of the box before she had to climb back in.

  He watched her uneasy sleep for a long time. Her strange hands were clamped into fists. In his imagination she needed the comfort of another human being as much as he did.

  He passed his hands over his eyes, and went back to the crew lounge. In front of the viewport he flung himself into a chair.

  Perhaps he was doing unconsciously what Ramona had said she could do deliberately: blocking out the new perceptions. He lay back, trying to feel all his senses, to leave himself open to any sight or sound or feeling such as he had experienced in his dream.

  He became hyperaware of the small sounds of the ship, the ventilation’s slow drift, the stretch and turn of leaves seeking starlight. He felt the nubbly blue of the upholstery beneath his spread fingers, and smelled oxygen’s occasional ionization.

  A whistle lanced through his hearing.

  Vasili’s cheerful notes, in a random cadence, implied good news, but the sound grated on Radu’s nerves. He put his hands over his ears and decided he preferred the pilot irritable, and silent. The whistling continued.

  You shouldn’t be bothered by it, Radu thought. It’s practically imperceptible in here.

  But once it had begun to trouble him he could not make it stop. He moved his hands back and forth over his ears, filling his hearing with raspy distant ocean sounds. But he could still hear the whistling.

  Go and ask him to stop, he told himself.

  That was as ridiculous as being troubled by the noise in the first place.

  He hunched over with his head on his crossed arms. He started breathing shallowly, rapidly, and his heart pounded, drowning out the whistling and conscious thought as well. Lying down, he curled up on his side with his knees to his chest, trying to ease the pain as his pulse dissolved into a useless flutter.

  He gasped for breath, rolled face downward, and spread his hands against the cool floor. Then, knowing his only hope of survival was to force away the panic, he very deliberately took control of his body’s reactions.

  He was adequate at biocontrol: On occasion, under ideal conditions, he could even achieve deep trance. Conditions were far from
ideal, but deep trance was not what he needed. Rather, he needed to dissipate stress before its build-up destroyed him. Breathing came first: He breathed slowly, deeply, and very, very regularly.

  Radu slowed and eased his heartbeat. He could feel his blood pressure falling. He pulled his knees to his chest, then straightened his legs and pushed himself to a headstand, supported in the corner. His mind grew calm and clear as he imposed upon it the patterns of relaxation.

  He only noticed how long he had stayed like that when he heard one of the pilots speaking. After a while it registered that the pilot was speaking to him.

  “What’s the matter? Is he all right?” Ramona’s voice came faintly from the control room.

  Vasili paused quite a long time before replying. “I guess he’s all right,” he said with irritation. “He’s standing on his head in the corner.”

  Radu realized how silly he must look. He opened his eyes. The pilot looked equally ridiculous, from Radu’s viewpoint. Radu started to laugh, and collapsed in a heap, giggling absurdly.

  “When you’re finished, let me know.” Vasili stalked away.

  Radu climbed to his feet, still laughing. He supposed he should feel humiliated; instead, he felt calm and relaxed and in possession of himself for the first time in far too long. Whether he could maintain the fragile grasp he did not know.

  He returned to the control room. “I am finished,” he said to Vasili.

  Ramona-Teresa gazed at him, her distress plain. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “What happened?”

  “I… reacted badly. The way I did on Earthstation, and when I was — when Laenea and I were together.”

  Ramona frowned. “Did you stop breathing? Was your heartbeat arrhythmic?”

  He shrugged. “For a moment.”

  She hesitated for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was very low and sad. “I think we must turn back.”

  “What? Why? No!”

  “Because our search is a long chance, one only worth taking if there isn’t any risk to you.”

  “That’s up to me.”

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t. Radu, I’ve seen pilots react badly to ordinaries, but not the other way around. I’m worried. If something happens to you in transit, and you can’t control it yourself, neither Vaska nor I could help you till the ship returned to normal space. Restarting your heart, regulating your breathing — we simply would not be able to do it. We could not.” She paused. “By the time we left transit, it might be too late. Do you understand?”