Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Real work,” Laenea said thoughtfully.

  “Yes… hard work, with hands or mind.” He picked up the second possible branch of their previous conversation without hesitation. “We do the work ourselves. Twilight is too new for machines — they evolved here, and they aren’t as adaptable as people.”

  Laenea, who had endured unpleasant situations in which machines did not perform as intended, understood what he meant. Methods older than automation were more economical on new worlds where the machines had to be designed from the beginning but people only had to learn. Evolution was as good an analogy as any.

  “Crewing’s work. Maybe it doesn’t strain your muscles, but it is work.”

  “One never gets tired. Physically or mentally. The job has no challenges.”

  “Aren’t the risks enough for you?”

  “Not random risks,” he said. “It’s like gambling.” His background made him a harsh judge, harshest with himself.

  “It isn’t slave labor, you know. You could quit and go home.”

  “I wanted to come —” He cut off the protest. “I thought it would be different.”

  “I know,” Laenea said. “You think it will always be exciting, but after a while all that’s left is a dull kind of danger.”

  “I did want to visit other places. To be like — in that I was selfish.”

  “Ahh, stop. Selfish? No one would do it otherwise.”

  “Perhaps not. But I had a different vision. I remembered…” Again he stopped himself in midsentence.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.” All his edges hardened again. “We spend most of our time carrying trivial cargoes for trivial reasons to trivial people.”

  “The trivial cargoes pay for the emergencies,” Laenea said.

  “That isn’t true!” Radu said sharply, then, in a more moderate tone, “The transit authority allows its equipment to be used for emergencies, but they’re paid for it, never doubt that.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Laenea said. “But that’s the way it’s always been.”

  “It isn’t right,” he said. “On Twilight…” He went no further.

  “You’re drawn back,” Laenea said. “More than anyone I’ve known before. It must be a comfort to love a place so much.”

  At first he tensed, as if he were afraid she would mock or chide him for weakness, or laugh at him. When, instead, she smiled, his wariness decreased. “I feel better, after flights when I dream about home.”

  If Laenea had still been crew she would have envied him his dreams.

  “Is it your family you miss?”

  “I have no family — I still miss them sometimes, but they’re gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You couldn’t know,” he said quickly, almost too quickly, as though he might have hurt her rather than the other way around. “The epidemic killed them.”

  Laenea tightened her arm around his shoulder in silent comfort. She regretted her thoughtless question. She should have expected that Radu had lost family and friends during Twilight’s plague.

  “I don’t know what it is about Twilight that binds us all,” Radu said. “I suppose it must be the combination — the challenge and the result. Everything is new. We try to touch the world gently. So many things could go wrong.”

  He glanced at her, the blue of his eyes deep as a mountain lake, his face solemn in its strength, asking without words a question Laenea did not understand.

  They walked for a while in silence.

  The cold air entered Laenea’s lungs and spread through her chest, her belly, arms, legs… she imagined that the machine was cold metal, sucking the heat from her as it circled in its silent patterns. She was tired.

  “What’s that?”

  She glanced up. They were near the midpoint of the port’s edge, approaching lights that shone vaguely through the fog. The amorphous pink glow resolved itself into separate globes and torches. Laenea noticed a high metallic hum. Within two paces the air cleared.

  The tall frames of fog-catchers reared up in concentric circles that led inward to the lights. Touched by the wind, the long wires vibrated. Touched by the wires, the fog condensed. Water dripped from wires’ tips to the platform. The intermittent sound of heavy drops on metal, like rain, provided irregular rhythm for the faint music.

  “Just a party,” Laenea said. The singing, glistening wires formed a multilayered curtain, each layer transparent but in combination translucent and shimmering. Laenea moved between them, but Radu, hanging back, slowed her.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t wish to go where I haven’t been invited.”

  “You are invited. We’re all invited. Would you stay away from a party at your own house?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Laenea remembered her own days as a novice on the crew. Becoming used to one’s new status took time.

  “They come to the port because of us,” Laenea said. “They come hoping we’ll stop and talk to them, and eat their food and drink their liquor.” She gestured — it was meant to be a sweeping movement, but she stopped her hand before the apex of its arc, flinching at the strain on her cracked ribs — toward the party, lights and tables, a tasseled pavilion, the fog-catchers, the people in evening costume, the servants and machines. “Why else come here? Why else bring all this here? They could be on a tropical island or under the redwoods. They could be on a mountaintop or on a desert at dawn. But this is where they’ve chosen to be, and I assure you they’ll welcome us.”

  “You know the customs,” Radu said, if a little doubtfully. When they passed the last ring of fog-catchers the temperature began to rise. The warmth was a great relief. Laenea let the damp velvet cape fall away from her shoulders, and Radu did the same. A very young man, still a boy really, smoothcheeked and wide-eyed, approached and offered to take the cloak. He saw the tip of the scar between Laenea’s breasts and stared at her in curiosity and admiration. “Pilot…” he said. “Welcome, pilot.”

  “Thank you. Whose gathering is this?”

  The boy, now speechless, glanced over his shoulder and gestured.

  Kathell Stafford glided toward them, followed by her white tiger.

  Gray streaked Kathell’s hair, like the silver thread woven into her silk gown. Veins glowed blue beneath her light brown skin.

  “I’m flattered that you came,” she said. “I heard you were in training.”

  Laenea heard in Kathell’s voice the same tone that had been in the shopkeeper’s, a note of awe and deference. She grasped Kathell’s hands.

  “I’m just the same,” she said. “I haven’t changed.”

  Kathell’s tiny, fragile hands trembled in Laenea’s strong grip.

  “But you have,” she said. “You’re a pilot now.”

  Discomforted, Laenea let her go.

  The other guests, quick to sense novelty, drifted nearer as if they had no particular direction in mind. Laenea had seen all the ways of approaching crew or pilots: the shyness or bravado or undisguised awe of children; the unctuous familiarity of some adults; the sophisticated nonchalance of the rich.

  Laenea recognized few of the people clustering behind Kathell. She stood looking out at them, down a bit on most, and she almost wished she had led Radu around the fog- catchers instead of between them. She did not feel ready for the effusive greetings offered pilots; they were, for Laenea, as yet unearned. The guests outshone her in every way, in beauty, in dress, in knowledge; yet they wanted her, they needed her, to touch what was denied them.

  She could see the passage of time, one second after another, that quickly, in their faces. Quite suddenly she was overcome by pity.

  Kathell introduced them all to her. Laenea would not remember one name in ten. Radu stood alone, slightly separated from her by the crowd, half a head taller than any of the others. Someone handed Laenea a glass of champagne. People clustered around her, waiting for her to talk. She found t
hat she had no more to say to them than to those she left behind in the crew. She smiled, doubting that the expression masked her unease.

  A man came up to her and shook her hand. “I’ve always wanted to meet an Aztec…”

  His voice trailed off at Laenea’s frown. She did not want to be churlish, so she put aside her annoyance. “Just ‘pilot,’ please.”

  “But Aztecs —”

  “The Aztecs sacrificed their captives’ hearts,” Laenea said. “We aren’t captives, and we certainly don’t feel we’ve made a sacrifice.”

  She turned away, ending the conversation before he could press forward with a witty comment. Laenea shivered and wished away the dense crowd of rich, free, trapped human beings. She wanted quiet and solitude.

  Suddenly Radu was near. Laenea grasped his outstretched hand. He said something to Kathell, which the ringing in Laenea’s ears blocked out. Kathell nodded and led the way through the crowd. The guests parted like water for Kathell. For Kathell and her tiger, but Kathell was in front. Laenea and Radu followed in her wake. They moved through regions of fragrances: mint, carnation, pine, musk, orange blossom. The boundaries were sharp between the odors.

  They entered the pavilion. Radu pulled the front flap closed before anyone else could follow. Laenea immediately felt warmer. The temperature was probably the same outside in the open party, but the luminous tent walls made her feel enclosed and protected from the cold vast currents of the sea.

  She sat gratefully in a soft chair. The white tiger laid his chin on her knee and she stroked his huge head.

  Kathell took the empty champagne glass and gave Laenea a different drink. Laenea sipped it: warm milk punch. A hint that she should be in bed.

  “I just got out of the hospital,” she said. “I guess I overdid it a little. I’m not used to —” She gestured with her free hand, meaning: everything. My new body, being outside and free again, Radu. Her vision began to blur, so she closed her eyes.

  “Stay awhile,” Kathell said.

  Laenea did not try to answer; she was too comfortable, too sleepy. She slowed her heart and relaxed the arterial constricting muscles. Blood flowing through the dilated capillaries made her blush, and she felt warmer.

  Laenea thought Kathell said more, but the words drowned in the murmur of muffled voices, wind, and sea. She felt only the softness of the cushions beneath her, the warm fragrant air, and the fur of the white tiger.

  Time passed, how much or at what rate Laenea had no idea. She slept gratefully and unafraid, deeply, dreaming, and hardly roused when she was moved. She muttered something and was reassured, but never remembered the words, only the tone. Wind and cold touched her and were shut out. She felt a slight acceleration. Then she slept again.

  o0o

  Orca felt tired after the long swim from Harmony to the spaceport. She swam into the ferry dock, pausing where water and air and the metal ramp intersected. The air world began to come back to her. Her metabolism slowed and she felt chilly. She never noticed the cold, deep in the sea.

  She stood and shook the water from her short, pale hair. She had arrived just ahead of a ferry. Its sails furled softly and its hull sighed as it settled lower in the water. Orca hurried toward the deck. Swimmers, even divers, were not supposed to come on board this way, but her people used the pier as if it had been built for them. They stayed out of the way of arriving and departing ferries, but that was only common sense.

  Whenever the port authorities roused themselves to complain, the divers’ council renewed its application to build an underwater hatchway in their quarters in the stabilizer shaft. The fight over the permits had been going on for years. For herself, Orca ignored the dispute and came on board whatever way was most convenient at the time, whether it was ferry dock or access ladder or a fishing pier’s elevator.

  The afternoon breeze slapped small waves against the sides of the port and dried the droplets of water clinging to the fine hair on Orca’s arms and legs. She stretched, spreading her webbed hands to the sun.

  She was well clear of the ramp by the time the ferry eased away. Naked and barefoot she padded into the blockhouse and pushed the button for the elevator. It was midafternoon, so quite a few people were around. Port workers and other crew members found the sight of an unclothed diver unremarkable, but some of the tourists stopped and stared. Orca ignored them. The only way to get from the surface of the port to divers’ quarters was to use the elevator, and the only way to get to the elevator was to cross areas frequented by the public. Orca was not about to wear a wet suit, or anything else, on a long-distance swim. For a diver, the idea was ridiculous.

  Sometimes a tourist complained to the port authority, and the port authority complained to the divers’ council. The council considered the objection gravely — and renewed the application for the underwater entrance. By this time, the sequence was practically a game.

  Public nudity never bothered Orca. She knew some people objected, but she found their reasons absurd. She had worn nothing more concealing than a knife belt until she was thirteen years old and taking her first trip into the human world. It had taken her years to get used to clothing. Even now she wore clothes more as decoration than as covering.

  The elevator arrived and Orca entered the cage. She was anxious to get to divers’ quarters. She was famished. She wanted half a kilo of broiled salmon and some French pastries. Coming across from the mainland, the fishing had been terrible. She had heard reports of several shoals of fish, but they were all well off a direct course to the port.

  Now that her metabolism had slowed to surface normal, Orca felt chilly in the air conditioning. Gooseflesh hardened her nipples. She folded her arms across her small breasts.

  Ever since she had left the water, her message signal had been glowing, a pinpoint of light just behind her eyes. Granting acceptance, she received the messages through her internal communicator. They scrolled across a screen she imagined in her mind, and she scanned each one quickly.

  A note from a friend pleased her; junk announcements broadcast to everyone on the port irritated her. She killed each one as soon as she had read far enough to identify it. The people who wrote them got cleverer and cleverer. Orca’s message bank contained a strong filter that was meant to discard most advertising and other solicitations. Some of the circulars had confused the program enough to make it let them through. Orca would have to rewrite it and strengthen its criteria. The escalation never ended.

  One message made her angry: “The pilot selection committee has scheduled an appointment… ”

  Oh, leave me alone, she thought without transmitting. She signaled the message bank to kill that note, too. The administrators thought she would make a good pilot. She was tired of declining their invitations; now she simply ignored them. She wished she could filter them, but refusing messages from one’s employer was not the most politic thing to do.

  She was tired of being tempted. And she was tempted, she never denied that.

  Orca could be on the crew and remain a diver. She doubted, though, that a pilot would still be capable of withstanding the physical stress a diver needed to take. Since no diver had ever become a pilot, the administrators could only offer Orca guesses and simulations about whether a mechanical heart would tolerate deep dives. Their guess was that it would fail, and Orca’s guess was that they were right. She chose to remain as she was, and she wished they would stop trying to change her mind for her.

  The elevator stopped at the divers’ floor, the doors opened, and Orca stepped out into the foyer. The carpet was soft against her bare toes. She fetched some clothes from the locker room, left the clothing and her knife in an empty bedroom, and wandered down to the kitchen. A friend of hers, a member of another diving family, sat at the table munching on a sandwich and watching TV, an old flat-screen rerun.

  “Hi, Gray.”

  “Hi,” he said with his mouth full.

  Orca liked Gray. He was quite beautiful, too. He was taller than average for a diver. H
is eyes were pale green, and he wore his sunstreaked brown hair unfashionably long, tied at the nape of his neck with a silver ribbon. Orca felt a familiar and pleasant surge of sexual desire. Whenever two families of divers met, it was the custom for the young adults to go off in a group and play. The custom continued out here, when divers from different families visited the spaceport.

  Orca could imagine Gray’s hair fanned out against a pillow, or drifting loose in the water.

  She pulled a couple of salmon steaks out of the refrigerator, slapped them on the grill, opened a bottle of champagne, poured herself a mugful, and sat down. “Can I have a bite?”

  Gray grinned and handed her half his sandwich. “Anybody who would drink champagne out of a mug ought to have peanut butter and jelly as an appetizer.”

  She took a bite of his sandwich and a sip of the champagne. “Not bad.” She offered him the mug. “Want to try it?”

  He shook his head. “Man from Atlantis is on in a minute.”

  “Oh yeah? Which one is it?”

  “The one with the giant flying octopus.”

  Orca refilled her mug, flipped the salmon to grill on the other side, and settled down to watch the ancient show. It had been filmed before any divers existed, and it had everything wrong. Orca loved it. She had never met a diver who did not enjoy it, except her father, who considered watching it to be insufficiently dignified and politically incorrect. When they projected it underwater the cousins sometimes joined in watching, but their reaction was one of bemusement.

  “He is pretty,” she said during a pause in the dialogue, when Mark Harris, the hero, was persuading the giant flying octopus not to help Mr. Schubert, the villain, take over the world, and the giant flying octopus was sending small squeaky noises of affection toward Mark Harris.