Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  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.”

  Chapter 13

  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.

  Ramona waited until the uproar quieted. The sea breeze ruffled her roan hair. Radu breathed the fresh air gratefully. He felt as if he had not taken a deep breath since Ngthummulun.

/>   The older pilot’s voice carried, strong and clear.

  “I know some of you,” she said. “Too often when we speak together it is because of tragedy. A friend has died, but his death was a natural one, and the sorrow should remain private. I want to speak to you instead of joy and discovery. The joy and the discovery are public.” She drew Laenea forward to stand beside her. “Laenea Trevelyan has done what the pilots have hoped to do since there were pilots. On her first training flight, she discovered the transit dimension which will open the universe beyond our galaxy.”

  Silence dissolved in another rush of questions. Laenea and Ramona answered. Laenea’s discovery overshadowed the story of the lost ship that everyone had come to hear. Perhaps they assumed the discovery explained why Miikala’s ship stayed out so long. At any rate no one asked Radu anything. He wondered if Ramona-Teresa, understanding that Laenea was a hero while Radu was a freak, had planned it this way. He suspected that she had, and he was most grateful to her.

  He admired her for her control of the crowd of reporters, gawkers, and passers-by. The force of her personality charmed them, much more than her status as one of the first pilots. She would have had the same effect on them if she were merely a politician or a street-corner haranguer. Though every word she spoke to them was the truth, she could easily have lied. They would have believed her.

  Suddenly, Orca bolted past Radu and down the stairs.

  “Orca!” Ramona shouted.

  If Radu were to escape, even only long enough to tell Orca what he feared, now was the time —

  At that moment Laenea plunged back into the shuttle, fighting for breath. She flung out her hands when Radu came toward her, roughly shrugging off his help.

  “I’m all right,” she said, her voice short and rough. “Just — don’t — touch me.”

  Radu obeyed, unwillingly. Laenea bent down, breathing hard.

  “Vasili Nikolaievich!” Radu cried. “Come help Laenea, hurry, please!”

  To Radu’s surprise, the young pilot, his expression and his posture as sulky as ever, appeared a moment later. He put one arm around Laenea’s shoulders.

  “You can’t do anything for her anymore,” he said. “It’s other pilots she needs, now.” He led her farther into the shuttle. Radu watched them go, wanting to do something, knowing he was helpless.

  Ramona-Teresa joined him a moment later.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. We… can’t even bear each other’s touch anymore.” He hesitated, then said, unwillingly, “You were right all along.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, sounding distracted, and followed the others into the shuttle.

  Radu was alone. He could not see where Orca had gone. The crowd had begun to disperse.

  This might be the only chance he would get. With one last wistful glance after Laenea, Radu stepped out of the shuttle, hurried down the ladder, and lost himself among the spectators.

  o0o

  Constant, painful, beautiful dreams of outside filled Marc’s fugue state. When he recovered and reoriented himself in time and space, he knew he could not continue as he was. His pretty things no longer sufficed. They never had, though he had succeeded in distracting himself with them for years.

  Exhausted, emaciated, and safe for a time from another attack, he came to himself again, and knew that he must change.

  He fixed himself tea and broth and settled in to catch up on what had happened while he was gone.

  Marc’s analogue had culled the messages from his informants, his news traces, and his database infiltrations. Marc’s sources of information were, as Radu Dracul had said, excellent. Radu’s problem was one to which he would have to set himself immediately. The analogue began the report on Laenea and Radu with reassurances: “Laenea is found again, but… ” and ended with a very human-sounding complaint that Marc had not troubled to mention Radu. Intrigued, Marc read the report.

  The day after receiving Marc’s cautions, the young offworlder had shipped out, with not one but two pilots — so much for taking Marc’s advice — and with a crew member who was also a diver. Marc had wished to meet Orca for some time. He prized unique people even over unique things.

  Marc had, over the years, acquired the habit of letting his attention wander. It passed the time more quickly than most activities, and often showed him connections he would not otherwise have seen. Now he reminded himself that time, which had not mattered to him for so long, mattered once more. He concentrated on the report.

  Laenea’s ship, declared lost, had returned in the company of the craft that had taken Radu Dracul back into transit. Both ships had docked at Earthstation, and an unscheduled shuttle now sailed back toward earth. It would soon land on the Northwest port. Anyone with both access to a radar trace and any intuition, common sense, or curiosity could guess that the shuttle carried the people who had been on Laenea’s ship and on the rescue craft.

  It should be very interesting up on deck.

  Marc turned off his news collation, stood, and brushed his fingertips across the controls of the door between his chambers and the outside.

  It was time for his exile to end.

  Marc left his rooms, walked down the corridor, boarded the elevator, rode it to the surface, and stepped out on deck for the first time in many years. Everything he was doing, he was doing for the first time in many years. He dared not let himself react with much intensity.

  He walked slowly toward the shuttle and the mass of people around it. He supported himself on his favorite stick, a long polished limb with a heavy growth of textured vine entwined around its length. Though he did not feel lame just now, he was shaky and agoraphobic, severely affected by the unaccustomed noise, the tumult, and the enormous space around him. His eyes were not used to focusing at such distances.

  The air, though, the air: He had forgotten how fresh and good the air smelled out here on deck, even among the machines with their tang of fuel and lubricants and ozone.

  The blockhouse lay like a silent island in a pool of illumination. The shuttle formed a promontory above a sea of people, lights, and shadows. Marc hobbled through the empty darkness separating them. He heard Ramona’s calm, certain voice, though he had not made out the question to which she was responding.

  Laenea stood beside her, Radu Dracul a little behind them. Marc allowed himself a smile, but tried to check the joy he felt at seeing Laenea alive. Marc thought himself safe from a fit — the malfunctioning nerve cells seemed to require a period of recovery between episodes of misbehavior — but he preferred to minimize the risk by remaining calm.

  He paused before he reached the edge of the crowd, reluctant to test himself against such a concentration of people. He glanced around, neither hoping for a break in the crush nor finding one. Only a single other person haunted the edge, as he did: a very young man, a boy, who might have been as old as fifteen. He was completely naked. He gazed up at the shuttle. Droplets of water glistened on his sleek body. His skin was the color of mahogany, and his hair, damp and plastered against his head, was so blond it looked like a silver helmet. He moved forward, his step hesitant. Light glowed through the tan pink webs of his hands.

  A diver, Marc thought.

  In the middle of answering a question, Laenea suddenly stopped, stepped back as if from a blow, turned, and vanished into the shuttle. Amid the murmur of surprise from the crowd, Ramona picked up the reply in midphrase.

  Knowing how severely Laenea reacted to ordinaries, Marc pushed forward, trying to get to the stairs. But that was the aim of everyone else, too, and he immediately realized how foolish was his attempt. He found himself crushed between a tall reporter and a short massive camera operator. He tried to back up, too late. He lost his walking stick. He stumbled; he felt himself going down as if he were diving into a warm salty sea. The reporter tried to help him, but the current pulled her away. Someone else bumped him and he fell.

  He was dragged across the deck; the sound of shoes and boots on metal over
whelmed even voices. The trembling began deep inside his body, and he curled himself up, thinking only, It can’t take me again, not so soon, not here among all these people.

  Then he was dragged free, and the footsteps and voices receded. He lay on the deck, his arms around his head and his face hidden against his knees for protection. He peered out cautiously.

  The blond dark boy, the naked diver, knelt motionless nearby, his hands, relaxed with webs and fingers spread, resting on his thighs. Marc had never read that divers had eyes any larger than the average, but the young man’s extraordinary black eyes were enormous.

  Marc unfolded his long, gaunt body and sat up slowly, grateful for the cold sea breeze. He shivered, but the sensation was different altogether from the trembling that warned of a fugue.

  “Are you injured?” the diver asked. “I thought they’d crushed you, when you fell.”

  “Say I was knocked down, at least,” the older man said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be churlish. Thank you for helping me. Do you see my stick?”

  The young diver glanced around, then got up and retrieved the cane, kicked aside at the edge of a spotlight’s shallow puddle of illumination. He brought it back to Marc.

  “Are you a pilot?” he asked.

  Marc touched the scars on his chest: two scars, not one, parallel to each other and close together, both scars old and faded to white.

  “No,” he said. “Not anymore. Are you a diver?”

  “Yes. My name is… Mark Harris.”

  Marc smiled and extended his hand. “We should get along well, then. My name is Marc, too.”

  o0o

  Orca used her strength and her small size to get through the crowd, bulling her way past people, slipping between them, till she reached open space.

  Her brother had freed himself and now knelt beside an older man, a grounder who, by the look of him, had come to some grief in the crowd.

  Orca spoke her brother’s underwater name. In the air the long descriptive phonemic string came out a high-pitched garble, but he recognized it and spoke her name in reply.