Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “The tag goes inside and at the back of the neck,” Marc said.

  “Where’s the neck?”

  “Here.” He showed him.

  “That’s a hole.”

  “It goes around your neck.”

  He would have ended up with the shirt wrapped around his throat like a scarf, so Marc took it from him and helped him into it as if he were a child. For all the familiarity he had with clothes, he might as well have been. They repeated the process with a pair of stiff new blue jeans.

  The jeans were too tight around Mark’s muscular thighs and too loose around his waist. He looked as if he were not so much wearing the clothes as existing inside them.

  “That’s the best I can do for now,” van de Graaf said. “If we go shopping, we might miss Orca.”

  o0o

  Every time Orca surfaced, the point of warmth behind her eyes, the message signal, had gained another level of urgency. It rose through the spectrum from dull red to yellow to blue to incandescent white. She knew that when she answered it she would be ordered back on deck, but when she finally chose to return it was — if it was anything in addition to her own desire — more because her cousins wanted to learn from her than because of what the administrators wanted.

  Orca dove one last time, cutting through the water beneath her closest cousin, spinning over, and sliding her hands along the whale’s smooth flanks as she passed her. She surfaced beside the port. She and her cousin called her brother, in harmony, then the killer whale slapped her tail against the water, sounded, and returned to the pod.

  A line snaked down the side of the port. Orca climbed hand over hand to the deck.

  Her brother reached down. She grabbed his hand and swung herself up. As soon as she came over the edge of the platform and Dr. van de Graaf saw her, the emergency message signal faded, leaving only the normal point of warmth that signaled regular mail. Mostly junk, no doubt, as usual.

  The crowd had dispersed. The shuttle stood silent and dark on the runway. Orca had stayed out longer than she meant to, but she felt wonderful. She was full of joy and disbelief at what her cousin had urged.

  Orca looked at her brother, astonished. “What’s this?” she said, touching the front of his T-shirt.

  “Well…” he said. He shrugged. “Clothes, I guess.”

  Orca shook the water from her hair. She put her arm around her brother and they walked back to where Marc sat on one of the benches scattered here and there beside the walkway. Dr. van de Graaf stood nearby, looking impatient.

  “About time you deigned to come back,” she said. Orca did not bother to answer.

  “I envy your freedom,” Marc said.

  Orca’s clothes lay in a neat stack on the end of the bench beside Marc. She felt too warm to put them on yet. She sat crosslegged near him.

  “Who are you?” Orca said.

  “I told you.”

  “You told me your name, that’s all.”

  “I’m a friend of Laenea’s.”

  Orca heard voices and glanced at the shuttle. The three pilots came down the stairs. Radu was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where did Radu go?” Orca asked.

  “That’s what we’ve been wondering,” van de Graaf said. “Where did you go? I told you to stay here. We’ve been waiting for you to come back for over an hour.”

  “I didn’t realize I’d been out that long,” Orca said without apology.

  Van de Graaf’s expression remained cool, but she scooped up Orca’s clothes and tossed them to her with a quick and angry snap of the wrist. Orca plucked them easily out of the air. She doubted that van de Graaf believed she had no idea where Radu had gone.

  Despite her calm, the doctor obviously felt angry at Orca for disobeying orders. Pilots could get away with disobeying representatives of the administrators, but it was not a prudent thing for a crew member to do. A week ago that would have worried the diver, but now she felt that no one, administrator or otherwise, could threaten her.

  “This is Laenea, and Ramona-Teresa, and Vasili Nikolaievich,” Orca said to her brother, nodding to each pilot in turn. “I guess you’ve met Dr. van de Graaf.” There was an awkward silence in which Orca should have introduced her brother by name, but did not. She could not. “This is my brother,” she said.

  Then, to her surprise, her brother said, “You can call me Mark Harris.”

  Startled, surprised, and delighted, Orca laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” van de Graaf said.

  “Never mind,” Orca said. “It’s too complicated to explain.”

  She started putting on her clothes.

  Laenea glanced at Marc. Orca thought they must not be as good friends as the older man had implied, for Laenea’s expression held more curiosity than recognition. The pilot frowned slightly, took one step toward him, and stopped.

  “Marc… ?” she said doubtfully.

  He pushed himself up, clasping both hands around the top of his stick to lever himself to his feet.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But how —? Why —?”

  “It seemed like the right time,” he said.

  He extended one hand. Without hesitation she clasped his wrist tightly. They embraced, more like crew members than a pilot and… Orca could not make herself think of Marc as an ordinary, a grounder, but she had no idea at all how she should think of him.

  “How did you recognize me?” Marc asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m changed,” Laenea said, “from what I was before.”

  He smiled at her. “I would imagine so.”

  Orca finished tying the laces of her shoes.

  “Are you ready?” Van de Graaf’s impatience crackled like static electricity.

  “Yes,” Orca said.

  “It was good of the two of you to welcome your friends home,” the doctor said, “but we’ll have to leave you now.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Orca’s brother said.

  “Are you sure?” Orca said.

  He nodded. “If you’re not coming home.”

  Now that her brother wanted to enter the human world, Orca suddenly felt afraid for him. She wished he had stayed in the sea. He was too much like the cousins to get along well here. To survive, he would have to learn things that he would never need to know, in his real life.

  Still, he had chosen the perfect surface name. Perhaps he would get along up here after all.

  “It’s impossible,” van de Graaf said. “We’re going to the administration deck. Your brother will have to stay out here.”

  “If he stays, I stay,” Orca said.

  “Out of the question.”

  “Surely not, Kri,” Ramona said. “If it will make Orca more comfortable for her brother to join us, why forbid it?”

  Van de Graaf sighed. “All right. He can come.” Her eyelids flickered as she communicated with someone or something. Orca tried, rudely, to listen in, but could not break into the frequency. The doctor returned and glanced at Marc. “I suppose you want to come along, too, Marc?”

  “That is true.”

  “Oh, what the hell,” van de Graaf said, with the exasperation of someone unused to anything less than total control. “Does anyone have any idea where Radu Dracul might have gone?”

  “You saw him the last time I did,” Laenea said.

  Van de Graaf glanced at Ramona, asking the same question with her silence.

  “He went past me and down the ladder. I thought he was trying to help Orca.”

  “Obviously not,” van de Graaf said. “Is there anyone else he might have contacted?”

  “As far as I know, everyone on earth that he’s acquainted with is right here,” Laenea said. Then, a moment later, “Except…”

  “Who?”

  “He only met her once, for a few minutes, at a party.”

  “Who?”

  “Kathell Stafford. Do you know her?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” She stroked the outer curve of her eyebrow thoughtfully for a mom
ent. “Well,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The group made its way toward the stabilizer shaft. Marc joined the pilots, who kept their distance from the divers. Dr. van de Graaf walked by herself.

  “I like your name,” Orca said softly to her brother.

  “I thought it might be awkward for them if I didn’t have one,” Mark said.

  “It would have made them uncomfortable — but they often feel like that anyway. They get over it.”

  Mark fidgeted inside his new clothes.

  “You wear this stuff all the time,” he said.

  “When I’m around landers,” Orca said. “But when I wear jeans, I leave them in a tide pool in the sun for about a week and then wash them before I ever put them on.”

  “Do you have to stay here?” he said quietly.

  “I have to be sure a friend of mine is okay.” She was worried about Radu. Whatever it was he had discovered must have troubled him deeply, to make him disappear so suddenly and completely.

  “I mean, would you be able to leave if you wanted?”

  “That’s a good question,” Orca said. It surprised her that Mark would ask it, and made her think again that perhaps he could get along in the human world. “I’m not sure I want to. I told the cousins what happened to me out there, and they understood. They want to know more — they want me to go back.”

  Mark looked at her curiously. “Really? Tell me what happened, too.”

  “I can’t. Not up here, it’s impossible. As soon as we swim, I will.”

  “All right.” He walked beside her in silence, in patience.

  Orca doubted she would be able to use her internal communicator once she was inside the administration deck, so she quickly explored several record indices. She found no trace of Radu. Orca doubted he would forget the lesson she had taught him. He would leave as little trail as if he were moving through the forest on his own home world.

  They approached the blockhouse. An elevator cage, doors open, waited for them.

  Orca still felt flushed and warm from the metabolic rush brought on by her swim, but the effect was fading. She would be glad to get out of the wind.

  Then the obvious thing occurred to her. She accepted her ordinary mail and scanned the messages quickly.

  Among the junk mail was an unsigned note.

  I accept your offer, it said, and that was all.

  Damn, she thought. It’s the wrong time, the wrong way for all this to work out…

  But maybe the only way, for Radu.

  Orca grabbed Mark’s hand.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  Without hesitation, without question or surprise, he turned with her and they ran toward the edge of the port. Orca heard van de Graaf curse, startled and irritated; Ramona-Teresa called her name, and Mark’s.

  They dove together and sank beneath the waves. Several meters down they swam close together and undressed each other, having trouble and laughing over Mark’s stiff new jeans. They abandoned the clothes by the edge of the port and swam away to join their cousins.

  Chapter 14

  Though no one in the group believed that Orca and her brother had gone for a quick swim, they waited a few minutes, till van de Graaf said, “Divers!” in disgust, and led everyone into the elevator. The doors closed and it slid downward. It stopped at a floor that Laenea had tried to visit a number of times, out of curiosity. The elevator controls always before had refused to acknowledge the request.

  The carpet in the foyer was deep and springy; the room van de Graaf led them to exceeded the VIP shuttle in luxury.

  The administrators do treat themselves well, Laenea thought.

  “The bar’s over there,” van de Graaf said, sat in a chair in a corner, closed her eyes, and went immediately into a communications trance.

  “I suppose she thinks all we do when we’re not flying is get drunk,” Vasili said, and flung himself into a chair, where he sat sullenly with his arms crossed.

  Ignoring him, Ramona-Teresa poured herself a straight shot of scotch and drank it. Marc found a bottle of tequila at the very back of a shelf. Laenea decided that a drink of cognac was not a bad idea.

  I might have expected that Vasili doesn’t drink, Laenea thought. Ah, well, he ought to be happy; at least it gives him something to sulk about.

  Laenea was on her second drink and Ramona-Teresa on her fourth when van de Graaf returned.

  “Radu has simply disappeared,” she said. “There’s no credit or transportation trace, and Stafford claimed she hadn’t seen him since he was with you. I had to remind her she’d ever met him.”

  “It was a far-fetched idea,” Laenea said. “They barely met.” Still, she thought, it was not like Kathell to forget anyone.

  “Maybe. But she wasn’t speaking to me directly; she used a remote. She could have been lying.”

  “You were monitoring her!” Ramona-Teresa said.

  Van de Graaf shrugged.

  “I don’t think you need to be so anxious about Radu,” Laenea said quickly. “He’s done this before, gone off alone. He just wants time to think. He’ll be back.”

  “You seem very sure of that.”

  “Well, what’s a few hours? It will take you a long time to turn him into a pilot.”

  “Radu Dracul cannot be a pilot,” Ramona-Teresa said. She poured herself another drink. So far she was completely unaffected by the alcohol.

  Laenea frowned. “But I thought — since he perceives seventh —”

  “He does. And six other dimensions. But some are different dimensions than those you perceive, which are the dimensions of transit. The intersection is not completely congruous. Without someone to follow, he’d be lost, he’d be blind.”

  “Then why do you want him back so badly? Why don’t you just leave him alone?”

  “His perceptions are of a different worth entirely than yours.”

  “It ought to be obvious to you, of all people, why we want to study him,” van de Graaf said to Laenea.

  “Hah!” Vasili said. “She doesn’t even have to think about it. She knows she’s safe.”

  “Vaska, what are you talking about?”

  “You can’t be lost!” Vasili shouted. “If you get lost, he can find you. What about the rest of us?”

  “Oh,” Laenea said. “You’re right, I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that.” The reason, though, was less selfishness than a determination to learn so much about transit that she never again would be lost, and need to be found. “I’m sure, though, if he can find others, he’d do it willingly.”

  “It seems unlikely to me that he could find anyone but you,” Ramona-Teresa said.

  “Then what —”

  “I think,” van de Graaf said, “that his abilities are unique, interrelated, and the result of a single basic change, brought about by the illness he survived. I think it likely that the viral genome integrated itself into his chromosomes.”

  “I disagree in part,” Ramona-Teresa said. “I believe that most of his abilities are present in some percentage of the population, but that they can only be expressed in the proper environment. I believe the illness forged some perceptual link between you and him. If you look at the mathematics, you can see that anyone who is aware of seventh is very close to any other person — or any other point — in normal space-time.”

  Van de Graaf interrupted. “Whatever the details of the effect, the cause is the illness. It must be. But the samples I took from him — skin and blood, nothing more invasive — show no obvious alteration. I need more samples, of more tissues, nerve tissue in particular, in order to study him properly.”

  “No wonder he ran,” Laenea said. “You want to sample his brain?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, pilot. I’m not going to dissect him. Any peripheral nerve cell would probably do; he wouldn’t even notice it. He has no reason to fear me, and even if he did, he had no way of knowing the direction of my speculations.”

  “Only a couple of hours of being questioned. You
can learn a lot from questions, even if you don’t know the answers. He isn’t stupid. He’s a colonist, he may not have a fine-edged education like you do. But he isn’t stupid.”

  “If I thought so before, I don’t think so now,” van de Graaf said.

  “You know him better than the rest of us, Laenea,” Vasili said. “Is he so selfish, does he dislike pilots so much, that he’d refuse a little more time and a few more tests, if it would save some of our lives?”

  “He’s the least selfish person I know,” Laenea said, annoyed. “And he doesn’t dislike pilots.”

  “That isn’t my experience.”

  “I think you’re trying to make individual dislike into something more general,” Laenea said, letting the edge in her voice come through.

  Vasili colored.

  “You still haven’t explained,” Laenea said to Ramona and van de Graaf. “If you don’t think he can find anybody else, why do you need him back so badly?”

  “Because the change might be transmissible.”

  Laenea sat very still, trying to change the meaning of what she had just heard, but failing; trying to control a slowly rising fury, but failing.

  “Good gods,” she said, horrified. “Do you realize what you’re saying?” She stood up, her fists clenched. “How could you even consider such a thing? Are you monsters?”

  “What?” van de Graaf said.

  “Laenea!” Ramona-Teresa said, in honest protest.

  “Don’t you know what that illness did to Radu’s world? It killed every member of his family, and it nearly killed him. I was there, I saw it —”

  They waited in patience till she finished her outburst.

  Ramona chuckled, low and soft. Laenea glared at her.

  “My dear,” Ramona said, “if you only knew how familiar that all sounds.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “‘It’s horrible!’ ” Ramona said in a voice not her own. “‘Taking young people and ripping out their hearts and putting in machines instead!’ ”

  “But —” Laenea said, confused. “It isn’t the same.”

  “How, not?”

  “We’re all volunteers, for one thing.”