“I’m third generation diver,” Orca said. “That’s hardly enough time for us to get decadent.”
Radu rubbed the stinging marks on his arm. “I won’t forget again.”
She touched him, gently this time. “Sorry,” she said. “Come with me for a way.”
She entered the elevator; Radu got in after her. They rose to the surface and left the blockhouse. Orca faced the night’s sea wind and breathed deeply. Beneath the hint of fuel and ozone lay the salt spray of half a world of ocean. Without waiting to see if he came with her, she walked along the edge of the platform for several hundred meters. Radu hesitated, then followed, and they walked together in silence. It was very late, very quiet; the brilliant spotlights fell behind and darkness enfolded and isolated them.
At the edge of the landing platform, Orca put her fingers to her lips and whistled, a piercing, carrying, complex burst of sound. She tilted her head, as if listening, and then she looked out serenely over the gentle swells. Radu saw nothing in the dark waves, and all he could hear was the soft splash of water against the port’s side.
Orca faced him, serious and intense.
“When you want it, I offer my help, and that of my family. Come to Victoria, to the harbor, and ask after us. We aren’t hard to find unless we wish to be.”
“Thank you,” Radu said again.
Orca unfastened her spangled jacket, let it slide from her shoulders, and stripped off her net shirt. She unzipped her pants, let them fall from her narrow hips, and kicked them off along with her red shoes. Her skin gleamed in the moonlight as she paused on the edge of the dock.
“What are you doing?”
“Going home.”
“You’re going to swim? All the way? Won’t you freeze? What about your clothes?” Now that she was actually leaving, Radu found himself gripped by a feeling of loneliness as sudden as it was unexpected, unwanted, and inexplicable.
“Everything I wanted to keep, I left in my bag. My clothes will get to crew quarters, or they won’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll take them.” He bent and picked them up.
Instead of replying, Orca pointed out at the sea.
The black dorsal fin of a huge animal cut the surface and vanished. A few seconds later the creature breached the water in a spectacular leap. White patches on its side shone like snow. The graceful bulk sliced the water noiselessly coming down, but at the last instant the creature slapped its tail on the water. Droplets spattered Radu’s cheek.
Orca laughed. “She’s playing.”
“What is it?”
“My name-cousin. Orca. The killer whale. She’s come to meet me.” The diver’s voice sounded far away, as if she were already swimming naked and joyous in the frigid mysterious sea. “She’s come to take me home.”
“Good-bye, Orca,” Radu said.
She did not answer, and she did not hug him good-bye. She was no longer crew, but a diver. She drew back her arms, and, as she launched herself off the platform, flung them forward. Her long, flat dive curved down from the high deck, and she entered the water between two swells, without a splash.
Radu watched for her to surface, but saw neither Orca nor her name-cousin again.
He searched for them for several minutes, then finally, turned away from the sea. If he was to follow Marc’s advice, which seemed very sound to him, he had just enough time to catch the early morning ferry to the mainland. He looked forward to getting away from huge metal constructions, to breathing fresh air, to watching the sun rise over a dark line of distant mountains. He wondered how fast Orca and her name-cousin traveled, and whether the ferry might sail past them; would they swim underwater all the way? He did not know if Orca could breathe water, or if she had to surface for air. But perhaps, at dawn, he might stand on the deck and see her swimming with her friend on the bright horizon.
Water slapped gently against the side of the port. The lights of the ferry dock made dim, distant stars in the fog. Radu walked along the edge of the platform. The darkness and the quiet reminded him of home, and of the two years he had spent all alone in the mountains. There he had been alone without feeling loneliness. Loneliness was much more powerful in the midst of many people.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he thought angrily. Orca offered you help, and friendship, and you turned her down.
Still, he wished he could dive out into the mist, into the black and soothing sea, and swim through the solitude and silence all the way to the mainland.
He knew better. Whatever permitted Orca to swim long distances in this climate and temperature, Radu lacked. In the frigid water he would last a few minutes, a half hour with great luck. After that he would lapse into hypothermia, and then unconsciousness, and then he would die.
Shadows startled him. He turned, and saw nothing.
Or course you saw nothing, he thought. Nothing’s there. Why are you letting shadows scare you? If you’d behaved like this back home, you would have driven yourself crazy before a season was out.
But he could not help glancing once again toward the imagined movement.
Like a ghost, Vasili Nikolaievich appeared, only his pale face visible in the darkness. Radu gasped involuntarily. The shadows behind the pilot moved: Scattered light glinted off a long lock of blond hair here, a dark face there, a gray wolf-stone, glowing like an animals’ eye. The fog draped itself around them.
“This time you’d better come with us,” Vasili said.
Radu took one step forward. “Leave me alone,” he whispered. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“Please don’t argue. Everything’s been decided.”
“Not by me!”
“I told you before, you haven’t anything to say about it.”
Radu panicked. He flung himself around and fled. But there was nowhere he could go, with the pilots spreading out into a semicircle around him, capturing him against the edge of the port. He glanced over his shoulder. They were coming after him, getting closer with each step. He pushed himself harder, panting with exhaustion. Being away from home was making him soft.
Suddenly, in front of him, two more pilots appeared.
Skidding on the damp deck, he stopped. He turned slowly. The blurry, backlit shapes of the pilots were all around him. When he stopped again, he faced the sea.
Radu plunged headfirst off the platform.
He would swim to the ferry ramp, he would climb up it, he would make enough noise to attract the attention of someone besides the pilots —
He hit the water.
The cold knocked the breath out of him. He floundered to the surface, cold salt water in his mouth and nose. He sputtered and coughed and struggled against the return of panic. Above, the pilots argued. The fog hid them and blotted out all but the tones of their voices. They did not shoot at him, if they had weapons, and none followed him into the sea.
The salt stung the cut on his wrist until, in a moment, the cold numbed his hands.
Twilight’s icy mountain lakes held a touch of the world’s warmth, but this ocean promised only inconceivable depths of freezing, lightless water.
Radu paddled laboriously along the edge of the port. If he just kept going he would be all right. Each high swell slapped him in the face with harsh salt spray. His clothes weighted him down. He tried to kick off his boots. He failed. Shivering uncontrollably, he started swimming. He lost his grip on Orca’s clothes. They drifted away. He lunged for them and grabbed them. Somehow it seemed very important to keep hold of them. Orca’s jacket twisted around his arm.
His only hope was to reach the ramp before he passed out. The distance, which had seemed so short when he was running, stretched on interminably. A trick of perspective, he thought, his mind winding around the words, then losing the sense of them. A wave, rebounding from the side of the port, curled over him. He reached for the surface: He thought he knew where it was, but he stretched his arms into water like black ice, and his struggles got him no closer to the air.
; A huge dark shape appeared below him. The sight of it pierced through the cold. He remembered what he had read of earth and its predators, and what Orca had said of sharks when she showed him her claws. Terrified, he flailed upward and broke the surface. He tried to catch his breath; he tried to call for help. He tried to swim harder toward the ferry ramp, but the current carried him farther and farther from the port.
The creature rose under him and he felt the turbulence of its motion. He expected slashing pain, teeth through flesh, hot blood gushing through severed arteries and veins. But he felt nothing, except the black shape pushing him. He was beyond pain, beyond panic, beyond fear. Calm settled over him. When the creature attacked, he would not feel it. He would not feel anything anymore. Radu lost consciousness.
Chapter 8
Radu struggled with another nightmare. Laenea was on Twilight, a member of the crew of the emergency ship. The crew, rather than remaining safely in their orbiting ship, had landed with the medical team. They had arrived just as Radu had begun to feel, and deny, high fever and mental dissociation, the plague’s first symptoms. That was the reality. But in the nightmare it was Laenea who grew ill, and instead of her caring for him, he cared for her. He was afraid she would die like the others, friends and family, whom he had known would become ill but had no way to save. In the reality of the past, Laenea had saved his life. In the past of his nightmare, he saw that Laenea was dying, but refused to accept that result.
He woke. His dream, as dreams will, began to dissolve to nothingness.
He pushed at the lid of his body box. His hand encountered rough wood. In a moment of pure terror and resurging memory he jammed his hands up against the planks. He had been dying of the cold, he had been attacked by a creature. He had been taken for dead and no one had read his will. Instead of burning him and sending his ashes home, they had boxed him up and put him in the ground. A recurrent nightmare was coming true.
After the plague he dreamed over and over and over again that he had been buried along with the rest of his family and most of his friends. In the peculiar multiple time flow of the dreaming state, he saw himself as gravedigger for himself just as he had been gravedigger in dreams and in reality for his mother and for his other parents, for his sisters and brothers, one after another till he was alone. In his dreams they, and he, struggled to get out of the coffin, to throw off the thickening cover of soil, and to return to life.
I’ll never save them now, he thought. Not them, or Laenea —
The lid stayed solid above him and he flung his hands apart, searching for some weakness in his prison. One hand hit a wall, but the other clutched only air, and the combined motions made him lurch sideways.
He fell out of bed.
The air was fresh and the echoes those of a room. So many levels of dream and nightmare, memory and reality, swept around him that he wondered if he had gone mad.
The lights flicked on, bright enough to dazzle him. A vague shape jumped down beside him.
“Radu, are you all right?”
He recognized Orca’s voice. His eyes reaccustomed themselves to light. Orca sat on her heels before him, watching him anxiously.
Radu pushed himself up and looked around. Books lined two walls; the built-in bunk beds lent the cabin a nautical look. But the underwater porthole over the desk, and the chamber’s dimensions and floor plan, revealed it to be one of the ocean spaceport’s sleeping rooms.
“What happened?”
“I had a nightmare, and I remembered one I thought I was having again,” he said. “I’m awake now.” He tried to stand, but could not gather the strength. “I thought…” He glanced down. His legs were unwounded, unscarred.
Orca nodded toward the porthole. In the light that dissolved through the glass into the sea, the black-and-white form of Orca’s friend the killer whale glided by. Radu shivered.
“My cousin heard you,” Orca said. “We hadn’t gone very far, we were playing. When she heard you dive she thought you might be one of us, but neither of us recognized the swimming patterns. Then you started moving like you were in trouble, so we came back.”
“I’m very grateful that you did.”
She shrugged, then scowled. “Did they push you in?”
“No,” he said. “They followed me. They wanted me to come with them, but… I declined. I don’t think they intended to drive me into the water. It’s only that they scared me, and I panicked.”
“‘Only’ scared you? Like the other time?” Orca said angrily. “They weren’t even trying to help you — and by the time I got you out of the water they’d just disappeared.”
“Where are they now?”
“Some of them are waiting for you. They can’t come into the divers’ section without an invitation. But they’re waiting outside.”
“I’ve made a very bad mistake,” Radu said. “I’ve put you in danger but left you in ignorance. I can try to correct that, if you still want me to.”
She helped him back into his bunk, pulled a blanket around him, and sat crosslegged nearby.
“I guess you’d better.” She sounded much less eager than before to hear what he had to say.
He would not have believed the simple telling of a story could exhaust him so completely, but when he reached his dive from the edge of the landing platform he was shaking with fatigue.
“Good lord,” Orca said. “Awake in transit… no wonder.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Radu said, pressing the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, trying to drive away some of the tension and fatigue. “Marc said to wait until he had news for me, but who knows how long it might take him to…” He had kept Marc’s secrets and told Orca only his own, but that made some things difficult to explain. “To make any progress.”
“Why don’t you call him and see if he has any help for you so far? Then at least you’ll know if you need to try something else.”
Radu suspected that Marc’s illness was too serious to be dispensed with overnight, but a call was worth a try.
“That’s a good idea,” he said.
“I’ll wait for you in the lounge,” Orca said, and left him alone.
Leaving off the outgoing video, Radu called Marc’s number. If he did not answer, Radu would try to reach Laenea again. Surely she must be back by now.
The flowing colors Marc used to represent himself intertwined and separated.
“Hello.” Compared to his real voice, the electronic tones were smooth and uninteresting. “Who’s calling, please?”
“This is Radu Dracul, Marc. Are you better?”
“I beg your pardon? Who are you?”
Too startled to answer, Radu stared at the screen.
“Would you repeat your name, please?”
“Radu Dracul. Laenea Trevelyan’s friend.” But it was clear to him what had happened: The illness had wiped out Marc’s memory of their conversation, and of Radu himself.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“It’s only that I can’t find your name. I have Laenea’s, of course.”
“I was with you a few hours ago, just before you became ill. I shouldn’t have disturbed you so soon.” Upset and disappointed, knowing he was being unfair, Radu reached to cut the connection.
“Wait,” said Marc’s voice. “Are you aware that Marc has an analogue? I’m not Marc himself. I’m in use when he isn’t available.”
“No,” Radu said. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
“I apologize for being unfamiliar with you, but my personal programming is several hours behind. Marc feels it is bad manners to record everything he handles himself. That sometimes creates difficulties when he is… called away suddenly, as he was last night.”
“I know. I was with him.”
“With him?”
“Yes. Is he better?”
“I’m specifically prohibited from discussing that subject,” the analogue said. “May I help you in some other way? Are you calling abo
ut Laenea? Marc, too, was friends with her. I’m not looking forward to telling him she’s lost.”
“Lost…?”
“Her ship is lost.”
“How could it be lost?” Radu said, completely stunned. “I don’t understand. I was just about to call her, she’s out in training, there’s no indication that anything’s wrong —” He was babbling. He stopped.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said the analogue, in a tone of sincere regret. “When you mentioned her I thought you’d heard.”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
“Her ship has been declared lost. Her teacher’s ship, I mean, of course.”
“But — it’s only overdue. A few days —”
“The ship is two weeks late. Dear boy, the first trip out is meant to be brief.”
“How can they declare her lost? Just because someone says so —”
“The training flight Miikala chose for her takes between half an hour and half a day. Her presence introduces an unknown, of course, into an equation that is empirical at best. But they’ve waited a very long time —”
Radu stopped listening to Marc’s sympathetic, informative, compassionless analogue, refusing to be forced to believe Laenea was gone. He shut out the screen’s decorative patterns. Laenea was too real to be lost. He had not yet even managed to convince himself they could never be lovers again, though he knew it was impossible. He would never convince himself she was lost: dead. He would never try.
He thought: She was in danger, and I knew it. I woke up in transit because I knew it. Then he thought: It’s like the hallucinations back on Twilight. Maybe they weren’t hallucinations. Maybe Marc was right… And finally: The way Atna was right. He was wrong in detail, but he was right all the same.
The silence drew his attention back to the phone. Two pools of brilliant blue, like eyes, peered out at him. Startled, he blinked, and the pattern swirled into abstract shapes again.
“I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you,” Marc’s analogue said. “I would have said it more gently had I realized you had no intimation.”
Superluminal Page 17
