Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  But there was nothing.

  Radu sat down again and waited. He looked at his hands, watching for the skin to age and wrinkle. But they remained the same, brown and square, peasant’s hands. Despite his name, if his family included high-bred nobility, it was many generations back. His fingernails were short and rough, and sometimes he bit them.

  The vibration of the engines continued, smooth and steady, otherwise Radu felt no sensation of movement. He let himself feel his time sense, which had always expanded to include wherever he was at the moment. He had never paid much attention to the ability: It was a party trick, at most an anomalous and occasionally useful convenience. He could not teach anyone else to do it, nor could he explain it.

  Relativity required that time, as Radu perceived it, pass at different rates in different places. He was used to that, and he was used to feeling the changes intensify whenever he was on an accelerating ship. Here, in transit, the underlying order had dissolved into chaos. Time passed in one place at one rate, in another at another, but when he thought about the first again the hierarchy had changed. How he perceived that there was a change, he did not know. It was like being in a dark room, surrounded by moving sculptures, able to look at each piece only for a moment as a single light rested on one, blinked off, and blinked on illuminating another in a random order, at dizzying speed.

  He stopped trying to sort out his perceptions and waited quietly until he regained his equilibrium. Then he focused his attention on subjective time alone. To his surprise, it felt and behaved exactly as it would have if he had been in any other place. Pilots were said to experience a perturbation of their time sense in transit, but perhaps that was the result of the changes they submitted to in freeing themselves from the disparity between relativistic time in normal space, and the nonrelativistic universe of transit.

  However ordinary transit felt to Radu, it was profoundly unknown, and he was in danger. He could do nothing; he could not even reassure himself. He could only wait, without knowing how long the wait would be.

  So he waited, drenched in slow cold sweat, staring out the porthole at the infinite blank grayness. Once in a while he thought he saw a flash of color outside, but the flashes were always at the edge of his vision, and disappeared before he could look at them directly. He decided they must be his imagination.

  Hugging his knees to his chest, he put his head down. Comforted by darkness, he waited.

  o0o

  Time passed. His mind counted it as hours, but tension made it feel like days. When he nearly dozed, he jerked awake, afraid. Why should he be afraid to sleep? He felt groggy, and the fragments of a dream swirled around him — he heard Laenea’s voice — and vanished. He shook his head, stood, and paced across the crew lounge and back again.

  He went down the hall and flung open the door to the control room.

  At the console, the pilot stared out the sweeping forward port. The sound of the door disturbed him, or he saw Radu’s reflection distorted in the glass. He spun toward him with a cry. Vasili Nikolaievich’s horror gradually changed to shock. After a moment he exhaled sharply, fumbled for his breathing mask, and fitted it over his mouth and nose. He drew in pure oxygen from the tank slung over his shoulder. When he took the mask away he had composed himself.

  “Do you know where we are?” Radu asked. “Are we still lost?”

  The pilot gazed at him; he blinked once, exhaled again, took another breath, and answered. The faint tremor in his voice betrayed his apparent calm.

  “I know where we are,” he said. “I’ve found the way.”

  “How much longer do we have to stay in transit?”

  Vasili breathed deeply from his mask. “I tried to explain that the question isn’t answerable, we’ve got about the same distance still to go as we’ve already been, but that doesn’t mean the time will seem the same.” He spoke all in one breath, then put the mask back to his face. Breathing was the last normal rhythm pilots gave up in order to survive transit: They took irregular gulps of pure oxygen and exhaled only when the carbon dioxide level in their blood began to interfere with the exchange of oxygen.

  “Something would have happened by now if it were going to, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” the pilot said, “at least I think so, I’m sorry to keep saying this but I don’t know because we haven’t got any clear idea how things happen to normal people in transit.” He paused for breath. “The ones who were still alive couldn’t describe the sequences, and something that looks solid and sensible in transit will be something even a pilot can’t explain afterwards, you’ll see…” He ran out of breath and returned to his mask.

  “I don’t feel any different,” Radu said, then realized what Vasili had been trying to avoid saying. “You mean there’s no way to tell if something will happen to me until we leave transit.”

  The pilot kept the mask to his face much longer than necessary. Finally he took it away. He stretched his free hand toward Radu, as if in supplication. “I’m no expert, I haven’t studied what happened in the early days, besides, nothing happened to you the times you woke up.”

  Radu slumped down in the other seat, resigned to more uncertainty. The pilot glanced briefly over the instruments and immediately returned his attention to the blank gray port. He breathed occasionally from the mask, but so seldom that he obviously did it only in response to real need.

  Radu watched the digital numbers on the clock flick by, less evenly than the seconds ticked past in his mind. He tried to compare them for reference. After a while he shook his head in irritation. Something peculiar was going on, but he could not figure out what it was because he had forgotten what the clock had said when he first started watching it. That had nothing to do with the vagaries of transit: He was too distracted to be able to concentrate.

  “Now that you’ve seen it,” Vasili said, “what do you think of it?”

  “I beg your pardon? Think of what?”

  “Transit!”

  Radu frowned. “I think it’s excessively dull. But if you want to invent mysteries about it, I won’t tell the secret.”

  The pilot’s expression was nearly as surprised as when Radu appeared awake and alive and unchanged.

  “You mean you don’t see it — you don’t feel it?”

  “See what? Feel what?”

  The pilot flung out his arms, pointing to the viewport. “See that — and feel… its presence, all around you, palpable, it’s indescribable, it’s different for everyone.”

  “But there’s nothing there,” Radu said.

  Vasili Nikolaievich did not reply for a moment. Then, “What did you say?”

  “There’s nothing there. A blank gray fog. No space, no stars. Just nothing.”

  “You see nothing?”

  “Are you trying to make a fool of me? Shall I put my fantasies up there for your entertainment?” Radu spoke in anger. His fantasies were too painful even for him.

  “What are you?” the pilot whispered. “Are you some disguised machine, are you being tested, am I?”

  “What?” Radu almost laughed, but the pilot was deadly serious, and frightened. “I’m a human being, just like you.” He stretched out his arm, and his sleeve hiked up above the bandage on his wrist. “Pilot, you’ve seen me bleed.”

  The pilot shrugged. “Easy enough to counterfeit.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Radu said. “Intelligent machines don’t function properly in transit. Everyone knows that.”

  “Nor do ordinary human beings.”

  “If they invented such a machine there’d be no reason to keep it secret.”

  “Pilots would be obsolete — we may be anyway, because of you, no matter what you are, despite all the effort that’s gone into making us… acceptable.”

  “This conversation makes no sense, pilot,” Radu said. He could think of no gentler way to put it. “If someone went to all the trouble of making a human machine this would be a purely idiotic way to test it. And if someone made a human mach
ine they’d choose a better face than mine to put it behind.”

  The pilot’s tension eased slightly. “That’s true,” he said with childlike cruelty, “that last, at least, is true, but machine or not, you’re immune to transit — you’re oblivious to it! — and whatever you are, you make pilots redundant.”

  “I’m no pilot,” Radu said. “I haven’t the ability or the skills. And I haven’t the desire. I’m no threat to you.”

  Facing the blank window, the pilot took a deep, slow breath. “Maybe you really believe that,” he said, his back to Radu so his voice sounded remote, “or wish you did, but you’re wrong.”

  Radu folded his arms, glowering. “Or you could be wrong,” he said sarcastically. “I still could die.”

  “No,” the pilot said softly, “it will be a long time before your bones go to dust, you’ll live… unless I kill you myself.”

  Astonished, Radu made no response.

  “Go away,” the pilot said, “please go away.”

  Radu left the control room, though the tortured plea asked far more of him than that.

  Chapter 6

  Pilots had the reputation of being not completely stable. Radu had never paid the idea much attention. He did not know why talented people often fostered rumors of madness; truly insane people were unpleasant to be around. The only pilot Radu knew at all closely was Laenea Trevelyan, and she was exceptionally sane. Vasili was a bit eccentric, surely, but — mad? Radu tried to dismiss the pilot’s threat to kill him. No one had ever threatened him before. Back on Twilight, people lucky enough to escape the plague had resented him for contracting it and recovering. He was marked by his scars, and some people hated him for living while their own families died. But even in grief and fury, no one back home had ever threatened his life.

  The suicide pills remained on the table in the crew lounge. Radu picked up the vial, threw it down the disposal, and tried to persuade himself that he was not afraid of the pilot.

  o0o

  As Vasili Nikolaievich predicted, when the ship surfaced from transit, Radu did not die. He did not even notice the transition. He was sitting in the lounge, bored and tired but still unwilling to allow himself to sleep. For no good reason he was afraid to give up his consciousness, however naturally.

  Once in a while he glanced at the port, but the dead gray expanse, never mysterious, grew tedious. He began to ignore it; he began deliberately to avoid looking at it. But when he nearly fell asleep and roused himself, startled and disoriented and searching wildly for the fragments of another dissolving dream, he stared around the room and his gaze stopped at the port. Space had returned, normal space and a pattern of widely scattered stars. Earth, very close, blue and white and brown, loomed lazily above.

  The door opened behind him. Radu faced Vasili Nikolaievich, who nodded once without smiling. As he turned away, Radu took a step forward.

  “I want to call Laenea,” he said.

  “You can’t.”

  “You have no right —”

  “You can’t, because she’s out on her first transit flight.” Vasili Nikolaievich closed himself into the control room alone.

  The tension Radu had been under for so long drained slowly away. Between exhaustion, hunger, and the three different sleep drugs he had taken, he felt shaky and nauseated. His slashed wrist ached fiercely.

  He wished his dreams of Laenea in distress would fade away and vanish in the way of most dreams, but this they refused to do. Nothing would make him feel easy about her safety until she returned and he could speak to her. His nightmares, the hallucinations he remembered from Twilight, and Atna’s vision all twisted together, mixing reality and fantasy. Atna’s premonition of danger had too many connections to everything that had happened for Radu to be able to dismiss it so easily anymore.

  He felt trapped and uncertain, helpless to confront important matters, yet confronted by the trivial chores of preparing the ship for its return to Earthstation. He cursed, and got to work.

  As the other chamber cycled Orca back toward life, Radu returned resentfully to his own body box and cleaned up after himself where he had retched. In the bathroom he washed his hands and splashed cold water on his face.

  Did you expect the pilot to wipe up your vomit? he asked himself sarcastically.

  As he prepared a quick breakfast — they would not have time for anything more — he drank a mug of coffee, wondering if the caffeine would make him sick. But it helped.

  When he heard Orca trying to get up, he hurried to her side and helped her out. Her fingers were cold, the translucent swimming webs nearly colorless. He hugged her, stroking her neck, rubbing her sides and back to warm her. She shivered violently.

  “Damn,” she said. Her teeth chattered. She hugged Radu tightly, leaning her forehead against his chest. “I feel awful.”

  “It’s all right. We’re only two hours out from earth.”

  He held her until her shivering subsided.

  Orca laughed shakily. “Thanks. I’m okay now.” She drew away from him, embarrassed. “I never reacted like that before.”

  Radu kept on lightly stroking her arms, for she did not look fully recovered.

  “Did something happen?” she asked. “Do you feel any different than usual?”

  “No,” he said automatically, then, trying to take back the lie, “well, yes. It was more uncomfortable to wake up this time.” That, at least, was an accurate statement. He wanted to tell her the truth, but he was afraid to. He did not want to see the same look in her eyes that he had seen in the pilot’s.

  “I’m glad Atna stayed home,” Orca said. “That was a hard dive. I don’t know what it would have done to him. I think he was right to be afraid.”

  “Yes,” Radu said slowly, reluctantly. “Yes. His vision was correct.”

  Orca went below to check out the transit engines and prepare the ship for refueling. Radu tuned in a data signal from Earthstation, then, without waiting for the information to arrive, reset the clocks in the lounge. He had been reprimanded once for doing a reset before checking local time. The senior crew member had not bothered to notice that his reset was accurate. The record of a data signal contact saved trouble.

  The ship had been out six weeks earth subjective time. It would dock well within the deadline for the bonus. Vasili might even be able to rejoin his exploration team.

  Now that he had a moment to himself in the control room, Radu tried to call Laenea, hoping she had returned since Vasili asked about her. But her ship was still out. As far as he could tell, it was an even bet whether he or Laenea had been awake in transit first.

  He hoped she had found it more interesting than he had.

  She had been gone for quite a while. Radu wondered just how long training flights were meant to be. He tried to put off his worry by reminding himself that time in transit, at superluminal speeds, had no correlation with time in Einsteinian space, where all travel was slower than the speed of light. Against the six weeks that had passed on earth, Radu counted that the normal space segment of the trip to Ngthummulun had taken less than forty-eight hours, and he had been awake in transit barely a day.

  Radu watered and fed the life-support system. Both the instruments and his own senses indicated that the catalyzed photosynthesis was performing with efficiency.

  “What do you plan to do?”

  Radu started at Vasili’s sudden appearance.

  “I don’t know,” Radu said. “I’d planned to find another automated ship and go back out again, but —”

  “You can’t fly on an automated ship anymore. You’ll blast it out of transit every time.”

  “I realize that!”

  “Tell me something. Do you dislike me in particular, or pilots in general?”

  “Neither,” Radu said. “It’s only that I react to pilots the same way pilots react to normal people when they’re too near.”

  “What!”

  Radu shrugged.

  “I never heard of that happening before,�
�� Vasili said.

  Radu sighed. The last thing he wanted was to be told something else about himself that was unusual.

  “You’ll have to stay here,” the pilot said.

  “On Earthstation? Why?”

  “You can go to earth if you want. But you can’t go any farther without the cooperation of a pilot, and no pilot will let you fly until we’ve decided what to do with you.”

  “Vasili Nikolaievich,” Radu said, trying to keep his tone reasonable, “something very odd has happened. We need to talk to the administrators about it —”

  The pilot strode toward him with such fury that Radu backed up a step.

  “And then what? If you ever got away from them — if they don’t take your brain apart cell by cell to find out what makes it work —”

  Radu felt no inclination whatever to laugh at the ludicrous idea.

  “— you’d still have to ship out with a pilot. And if you betray us…” He let his words trail off. The threat was all the stronger for only being implied.

  “Pilot, I’m not your enemy. I’m not your rival. We ought to find out if anyone else is like me. I could have caused our ship to be lost — maybe this is what happened to other lost ships.”

  “What to do isn’t your decision.”

  “I think that it is.”

  “If you say anything to anyone without the consent of the pilots, you’ll regret it.”

  Radu gazed down at him. “You know,” he said suddenly, “Atna’s premonition was right.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Vasili said. He turned abruptly and left the room.

  Radu swore under his breath. Losing his temper was a bad mistake: Now he had complicated matters even worse. And it had been completely unnecessary to remind Vasili of Atna’s warning. He did not even know why he had done it.

  Orca climbed up from the engine room and slammed the hatch shut.

  “What was that all about?”

  Radu hesitated, wondering how much she had heard. He had to put aside the temptation to retract his earlier lie and explain everything. But that would put Orca in danger to no purpose.