Ramona-Teresa, a small, heavyset woman with black hair graying to roan, smiled and lifted her glass. “Pilot!” Miikala, whose eyes were shadowed by heavy brow ridges and an unruly shock of dark brown hair, matched the salute and drank with her.
This toast was a tribute and a welcome, not a farewell. Laenea smiled and lowered herself into the pit. Miikala touched her left wrist, Ramona-Teresa her right. Laenea felt, welling up inside her, a bubbling, childish giggle. She could not stop it; it broke free as if filled with helium like a balloon. She might have been in an environment on the sea floor, breathing oxyhelium and speaking donaldduck. She felt the blood rushing through the veins in her temples and her throat. Miikala was smiling, saying something in a language with as many liquid vowels as his name; she did not understand a word, yet she knew everything he was saying. Ramona-Teresa hugged her. “Welcome, child.”
Laenea could not believe that these lofty, eerie people could accept her with such joy. She realized she had hoped, at best, for a cool and condescending greeting not too destructive of her pride. The embarrassing giggle slipped up and out again, but this time she did not try to restrain it. All three pilots laughed together. Laenea felt high, light, dizzy: Excitement pumped adrenaline through her body. She was hot. Tiny beads of perspiration gathered on her forehead, just at the hairline.
Quite suddenly the constant dull ache in her chest became a wrenching pain, as though her new heart were being ripped from her, like the old. She could not breathe. She hunched forward, struggling for air. Each time she tried to draw in a breath, the pain drove it out again.
Slowly Miikala’s voice slipped beyond her panic, and Ramona-Teresa’s hands steadied her.
“Relax, relax, remember your training…”
Yes: decrease the blood flow, open the arteries, dilate the capillaries, discipline the involuntary muscles to voluntary control. Slow the pump. Someone bathed her forehead with a cocktail napkin dipped in gin. Laenea welcomed the coolness and even the odor’s bitter tang. The pain dissolved gradually until Ramona-Teresa could ease her back on the sitting shelf. The jet fastening of the cloak fell away from her throat and the older pilot loosened the laces of her vest.
“It’s all right,” Ramona-Teresa said. “The adrenaline works as well as ever. We all have to learn more control of that than they think they need to teach us.”
Sitting on his heels beside Laenea, Miikala glanced at the exposed scar. “You’re out early,” he said. “Have they changed the procedure?”
Laenea paled: She had forgotten that her leavetaking of the hospital was something less than official and approved.
“Don’t tease her, Miikala,” Ramona-Teresa said gruffly. “Or don’t you remember how it was when you woke up?”
His heavy eyebrows drew together in a scowl. “I remember.”
“Will they make me go back? Will you?” Laenea said. “I’m all right, I just need to get used to it.”
“We won’t, but they might try to,” Ramona-Teresa said. “They worry so about the money they spend on us. Perhaps they aren’t quite as worried anymore. We do as well on our own as shut up in a hospital listening to recorded hearts — they still do that, I suppose.”
Laenea shuddered. “It worked for you, they told me — but I broke the speaker.”
Miikala laughed with delight. “Causing all other machines to make frantic noises like frightened little mice.”
“I thought they hadn’t done the operation. I’ve wanted to be one of you for so long —” Feeling stronger, Laenea pushed herself up. She left her vest open, glad of the cool air against her skin.
“We watched,” Miikala said. “We watch you all, but a few are special. We knew you’d come to us. Do you remember this one, Ramona?”
“Yes.” She picked up one of the extra glasses, filled it from a shaker, and handed it to Laenea. “You always fought the sleep, my dear. Sometimes I thought you might wake.”
“Ahh, Ramona, don’t frighten the child.”
“Frighten her, this tigress?”
Strangely enough, Laenea was not disturbed by the knowledge that she had been close to waking in transit. She had not, or she would be dead; she would have died quickly of old age, her body bound to normal time and normal space, to the relation between time dilation and velocity and distance by a billion years of evolution, by rhythms planetary, lunar, solar, biological: subatomic, for all Laenea or anyone else knew. She was freed of all that now.
She downed half her drink in a single swallow. The air felt cold against her bare arms and her breasts, so she wrapped her cloak around her shoulders and waited for the satin to warm against her body.
“When’s your training flight?”
“Not for a whole month.” The time seemed a vast expanse of emptiness. She had finished the study and the training; now only her mortal body kept her earthbound.
“They want you completely healed.”
“It’s too long — how can they expect me to wait until then?”
“For the need.”
“I want to know what happens, I have to find out. When’s your next flight?”
“Soon,” Ramona-Teresa said.
“Take me with you!”
“No, my dear. It would not be proper.”
“Proper! We have to make our own rules, not follow theirs. They don’t know what’s right for us.”
Miikala and Ramona-Teresa looked at each other for a long time. Perhaps pilots could speak together with their eyes and their expressions, or perhaps Ramona and Miikala simply understood each other in the way of any ordinary long-time lovers. But they excluded Laenea.
“No.” Ramona’s tone invited no argument.
“At least you can tell me —” She saw at once that she had said the wrong thing. The pilots’ expressions closed down in silence. But Laenea felt neither guilt nor contrition, only anger.
“It isn’t because you can’t! You talk about it to each other, I know that now at least. You can’t tell me you don’t.”
“No,” Miikala said. “We will not say we never speak of it.”
“You’re selfish and you’re cruel.” She stood up, for a moment afraid she might stagger again and have to accept their help. Ramona and Miikala nodded at each other, with faint, infuriating smiles. A surge of brittle energy raised Laenea far beyond needing them.
“She has the need,” one of them said, Laenea did not even know which one. The ringing in her ears cut her off from them. She turned her back, climbed out of the conversation pit, and stalked away to find a more congenial spot.
She chose a sitting place nestled into a steep slope very close to the sea wall. She could feel the ocean’s coolness, as though the cold radiated, rather than heat. Grotesque creatures floated past in the spotlights. Laenea curled up and relaxed, making her smooth pulse wax and wane. If she sat here long enough, would she be able to detect the real tides? Would the same drifting plant-creatures pass before the window again, swept back and forth by the forces of sun and moon?
Her privacy was marred only slightly, by one man sleeping or lying unconscious nearby. She did not recognize him, but he must be crew. His dark, close-fitting clothes were unremarkably different enough, in design and fabric, that he might be from another world. He must be new. Earth was the hub of commerce; no ship flew long without orbiting it. New crew members always visited earth at least once. New crew usually visited every world their ships reached at first, even the ones that required quarantine and vaccinations, if they had enough time. Laenea had done the same herself. The quarantine to introduce null-strain bacteria, which could not contaminate exotic environments because it could only reproduce inside the human body, was the most severe and the most necessary, but no quarantine was pleasant. Laenea, like most other veterans, eventually remained acclimated to one world, stayed on the ship during other planetfalls, and arranged her pattern to intersect her home as frequently as possible.
The sleeping man was several years younger than Laenea. She thought he must b
e as tall as she, but that estimation was difficult. He was one of those uncommon people so beautifully proportioned that from any distance at all their height can only be determined by comparison. Nothing about him was exaggerated or attenuated; he gave the impression of strength, but it was the strength of agility, not violence. Laenea decided he was neither drunk nor drugged but asleep. His face, though relaxed, showed no dissipation. His hair was dark blond and shaggy, a shade lighter than his heavy mustache. He was far from handsome: His features were regular, distinctive, but without beauty. Below the cheekbones his tanned skin was scarred and pitted, as though from some virulent childhood disease. Some of the outer worlds had not yet conquered their epidemics.
Laenea looked away from the new young man. She stared at the dark water at light’s end, letting her vision double and unfocus. She touched her collarbone and slid her fingers to the tip of the smooth scar. Sensation seemed refined across the tissue, as though a wound there would hurt more sharply. Though Laenea was tired and getting hungry, she did not force herself to outrun the distractions. For a while her energy should return slowly and naturally. She had pushed herself far enough for one night.
A month would be an eternity; the wait would seem equivalent to all the years she had spent crewing. She was still angry at the other pilots. She felt she had acted like a little puppy, bounding up to them to be welcomed and patted, then, when they grew bored, they had kicked her away as though she had piddled on the floor. And she was angry at herself: She felt a fool, and she felt the need to prove herself.
For the first time she appreciated the destruction of time during transit. To sleep for a month: convenient, impossible. She first must deal with her new existence, her new body; then she would deal with a new environment.
Perhaps she dozed. The deep sea admitted no time: The lights pierced the same indigo darkness day or night. Time was the least real of all dimensions to Laenea’s people, and she was free of its dictates, isolated from its stabilities.
When she opened her eyes again she had no idea how long they had been closed, a second or an hour.
The time must have been a few minutes, at least, for the young man who had been sleeping was now sitting up, watching her. His eyes were dark blue, flecked with black, a color like the sea. For a moment he did not notice she was awake, then their gazes met and he glanced quickly away, blushing, embarrassed to be caught staring.
“I stared, too,” Laenea said.
Startled, he turned slowly back, not quite sure Laenea was speaking to him. “What?”
“When I was a grounder, I stared at crew, and when I was crew I stared at pilots.”
“I am crew,” he said defensively.
“From —?”
“Twilight.”
Laenea had been there, a long while before; images of Twilight drifted to her. It was a new world, a dark and mysterious place of high mountains and black, brooding forests, a young world, its peaks just formed. It was heavily wreathed in clouds that filtered out much of the visible light but admitted the ultraviolet. Twilight: dusk, on that world. Never dawn. No one who had ever visited Twilight would think its dimness heralded anything but night. The people who lived there were strong and solemn, even confronting disaster. On Twilight she had seen grief, death, loss, but never panic or despair.
Laenea introduced herself and offered the young man a place nearer her own. He moved closer, reticent. “I am Radu Dracul,” he said.
The name touched a faint note in her memory. She followed it until it grew loud enough to identify. She glanced over Radu Dracul’s shoulder, as though looking for someone. “Then — where’s Vlad?”
Radu laughed, changing his somber expression for the first time. He had good teeth, and deep smile lines that paralleled the drooping sides of his mustache. “Wherever he is, I hope he stays there.”
They smiled together.
“This is your first tour?”
“Is it so obvious that I’m a novice?”
“You’re alone,” she said. “And you were sleeping.”
“I don’t know anyone here. I was tired,” he said, quite reasonably.
“After a while…” Laenea nodded toward a nearby group of people, hyper and shrill on sleep repressors and energizers. “You don’t sleep when you’re on the ground if there are people to talk to, if there are other things to do. You get sick of sleep, you’re scared of it.”
Radu stared toward the ribald group that stumbled its way toward the elevator. “Do all of us become like that?”
“Most.”
“The sleeping drugs are bad enough. They’re necessary — everyone says. But that…” He shook his head slowly. His forehead was smooth except for two vertical lines that appeared between his eyebrows when he frowned; it was below his cheekbones, to the square corner of his jaw, that his skin was scarred.
“No one will force you,” Laenea said. She was tempted to touch him; she would have liked to stroke his face from temple to chin, and smooth a lock of hair rumpled by sleep. But he was unlike other people she had met, whom she could touch and hug and go to bed with on short acquaintance and mutual whim. Radu had about him something withdrawn and protected, almost mysterious, an invisible wall that would only be strengthened by an attempt, however gentle, to broach it. He carried himself, he spoke, defensively.
“But you think I’ll choose it myself.”
“It doesn’t always happen,” Laenea said, for she felt he needed reassurance; yet she also felt the need to defend herself and her former colleagues. “We sleep so much in transit, and it’s such a dark time, it’s so empty…”
“Empty? Don’t you dream?”
“No, never.”
“I always do,” he said. “Always.”
“I wouldn’t have minded transit time so much if I’d ever dreamed.”
Understanding drew Radu from his reserve. “I can see how it might be.”
Laenea thought of all the conversations she had had with all the other crew she had known. The silent emptiness of their sleep was the single constant of all their experiences. “I don’t know anyone else like you. You’re very lucky.”
A tiny luminous fish nosed up against the sea wall. Laenea reached out and tapped the glass, leading the fish in a simple pattern drawn with her fingertip.
“I’m hungry,” she said abruptly. “There’s a good restaurant in the point stabilizer. Will you join me?”
“A restaurant — where people… buy food?”
“Yes.”
“I am not hungry.”
He was a poor liar; he hesitated before the denial, and he did not meet Laenea’s gaze.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” He looked at her again, smiling slightly. That at least was true; he was not worried.
“Are you going to stay here all night?”
“It isn’t night, it’s nearly morning.”
“A room’s more comfortable — you were asleep.”
He shrugged; she could see she was making him uneasy. She realized he must not have any money.
“Didn’t your credit come through?” she asked. “That happens all the time. I think chimpanzees write the bookkeeping programs.” She had gone through the red tape and annoyance of emergency credit several times when her transfers were misplaced or miscoded. “All you have to do —”
“The administrators made no error in my case.”
Laenea waited for him to explain or not, as he wished. Suddenly he grinned, amused at himself but not self-deprecating. He looked even younger than he must be, when he smiled like that. “I’m not used to using money for anything but… unnecessaries.”
“Luxuries?”
“Yes. Things we don’t often use on Twilight, things I don’t need. But food, a place to sleep —” He shrugged again. “They are always freely given, on colonial worlds. When I got to earth, I forgot to arrange a credit transfer. I know better.” He was blushing faintly. “I won’t forget again. I miss a meal and one night’s sle
ep — I’ve missed more on Twilight, when I was doing real work. In a few hours I correct my error.”
“There’s no need to go hungry now,” Laenea said. “You can —”
“I respect your customs,” Radu said. “But my people prefer not to borrow and we never take what is unwillingly given.”
Laenea stood up and held out her hand. “I never offer unwillingly. Come along.”
His hand was warm and hard, like polished wood.
Chapter 2
At the top of the elevator shaft, Laenea and Radu stepped out into the middle of the night. It was foggy and luminous, sky and sea blending into uniform gray beneath the brilliant moon. No wind revealed the surface of the sea or the limits of the fog, but the air was cold. Laenea swung the cloak around them both. A light rain, almost invisible, drifted down, beading mistily in tiny brilliant drops on the black velvet and on Radu’s hair. He was silver and gold in the artificial light.
“It’s like Twilight now,” he said. “It rains like this in the winter.” He stretched out his arm, with the black velvet draping down like quiescent wings, opened his palm to the rain, and watched the minuscule droplets touch his fingertips. Laenea could tell from the yearning in his voice, the wistfulness, that he was painfully, desperately homesick. She said nothing, for she knew from experience that nothing could be said to help. The pain faded only with time and fondness for other places. Earth as yet had given Radu no cause for fondness. But now he stood gazing into the fog, as though he could see continents, or stars. She slipped her arm around his shoulders in a gesture of comfort.
“Let’s walk to the point.” Laenea had been enclosed in testing and training rooms and hospitals as he had been confined in ships and quarantine: She, too, felt the need for fresh air and rain and the ocean’s silent words.
The sidewalk followed the edge of the port. A rail separated it from a drop of ten meters to the sea. Incipient waves caressed the metal cliff obliquely and slid away into the darkness. Laenea and Radu walked slowly along, matching strides. Every few paces their hips brushed together. Laenea glanced at Radu occasionally and wondered how she could have thought him anything but beautiful. Her heart circled slowly in her breast, low pitched, relaxing, and her perceptions faded from fever clarity to misty dark and soothing. A veil seemed to surround and protect her. She became aware that Radu was gazing at her, more than she watched him. The cold touched them through the cloak, and they moved closer together; it seemed only sensible for Radu to put his arm around her, too, and so they walked, clasped together.
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