Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “It isn’t your fault,” Radu said dully. “I’d better go.”

  “Do you want to leave a message? Where can you be reached?”

  “I don’t know,” Radu said. “Tell Marc…” He could think of nothing of any substance to say to Marc. “Tell him I called.”

  “He will know.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t know who you were,” said the analogue. It broke the connection and the vibrant colors faded away.

  In a daze, Radu slowly drew on his clothes and went into the divers’ lounge.

  Orca’s smile faded when she saw his expression.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Laenea’s ship has been declared lost.”

  “Oh, Radu —” She took his hand in a gesture of comfort, led him to a couch, and made him sit down. “I’m so sorry… I met her, on the crew. I liked her.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t... I won’t.”

  They sat together in silence for some minutes. If Orca accepted that Laenea was dead, she did not try to persuade Radu to bow to inevitability.

  “Do you want me to leave you alone for a while? Or do you want me to stay with you?”

  “I dreamed of her on the way back from Ngthummulun.”

  “When? How could you? We didn’t have time for any real sleep.”

  “In transit, before I rejected the drugs. I usually dream in transit, but this time I had nightmares.” His last image was of Laenea crying out in distress, crying out for help he could not give. He did not want that to be his last memory of her. He wanted to remember her with her head thrown back, laughing.

  “Oh, gods,” he groaned. He hid his face in his hands. “I thought they were hallucinations, I thought they’d stopped. Why do I dream about when my friends will die?”

  Orca hesitated, then said, “You mean you dream they’ll die, and they do?”

  “I dream they need help, but I never know how to help them. It happened during the plague,” he said miserably. “I know it sounds crazy…”

  “Not particularly,” Orca said. “But you seemed to think so, when it was Atna.”

  Radu drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “I did… but I didn’t. I thought what happened to me was hallucination, or fever memory.”

  Orca stroked his arm.

  “Back home,” Radu said, “when people started getting sick… my dreams changed. After a while I began to think I knew who was going to die. I tried to warn people…”

  “Oh, lord,” Orca said.

  “Yes.” Radu shook his head. “It should have taught me something, but I think I learned the wrong lesson. I acted toward Atna just the way the others acted toward me.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Orca said. “There wasn’t anything you could do back on Twilight and there wasn’t anything you could do in transit. Even pilots don’t look for lost ships. I’m sorry Laenea is gone, but you’re the one who’s in trouble now. You’ve got to look out for yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “What? Do you want to just give up to the pilots?”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” Radu said. The slash on his wrist throbbed. “I mean why doesn’t anybody look for lost ships?”

  “Because they tried for years to find any of them, even one, and they never did. So they stopped looking.”

  “They can’t find them because they can’t communicate with them. But Laenea did need help, and I knew it.”

  “Radu, she’s lost.”

  “Lost — that doesn’t mean she’s dead. Nobody knows what it means! She could still be alive.” He looked toward the exit door, thinking about what lay beyond the divers’ quarters.

  Orca followed his gaze. “You can’t go out there!”

  “I have to. I have to try to get them to listen to me. I dreamed I could help, if I only knew what to do. Now I know. I have to find her.”

  “What makes you think they’ll believe you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “They have no reason to trust me and several reasons not to. And they see me as a threat. But I have to try. Otherwise Laenea and her teacher and the people in their crew will all die.” He stood up. He still felt shaky.

  Orca caught his arm, gripping him just hard enough to remind him of her strength.

  “What the hell did I come back for you for, if you’re just going to go out and let them throw you in the ocean again? I could be halfway home by now,” she said. “This is just crazy.”

  “I don’t blame you for feeling that way,” Radu said. He laid his hand gently on hers, and she relaxed her grip.

  “Sorry.”

  “Never mind,” Radu said. “You’re probably right, after all.”

  “If you believed that, you wouldn’t be going out there.” She followed him into the hall and to the center of the divers’ quarters, where a doorway led to the public elevator lobby.

  “Thank you, for everything,” Radu said.

  “I don’t guess you happen to be one of those people who think that since I saved your life I get to tell you what to do with it from now on.”

  “I’m afraid not,” he said, then laughed. He hugged her, perhaps a little longer, a little more tightly, than if this had been a regular farewell between two members of a starship crew. If the pilots believed him, if he could persuade them to do as he wished, then he would have to endure their company for some inestimable time alone, without the buffer of another normal human being. He was very glad he would have the memory of Orca’s friendship.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye.”

  He faced the door, reluctant to open it, then stepped close enough for it to sense him. It slid aside, then slid closed behind him.

  The two pilots waiting for him rose. Vasili Nikolaievich, particularly, looked surprised to see him. Neither pilot appeared to have any idea what to do with him now that he had come to face them of his own free will.

  “You wouldn’t tell me what you wanted of me,” Radu said, “so I’ll say what I want of you.”

  Vasili scowled. “I don’t think you have that choice.”

  Radu walked toward the pilots, feeling more and more tense.

  “Laenea Trevelyan’s ship has been lost,” he said. “I think I can find it. I think that was what was happening to me when —”

  “You… what?” said the other pilot. “Wait. We can’t discuss this here.” She reached out to take his arm. “Come along with us, will you?”

  Radu drew back.

  “I’ll come,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude. Your proximity is as uncomfortable to me as mine is to you.”

  “You think so, do you?” Vasili said.

  “Shut up, Vaska,” the other pilot said. “We’ve screwed this up badly enough already. Come on, let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

  o0o

  Orca let Radu Dracul leave, all alone. He was an adult; he had the right to make his own decisions, even if he did not know what he was doing, even if the decisions were stupid ones.

  Her cousin glided past the porthole, brushing the glass with the tip of her fluke. The soft sound reminded Orca of her other responsibilities, and her promise to her family; it reminded her of last night, swimming free with her friend. Orca always felt isolated when she left the sea, as if all her senses had been damped down to half intensity. It was not only sound that carried much more efficiently in water than in air, but touch and scent and heat perception as well. The texture was altogether different. The density of experience increased a hundredfold. Orca cupped her hands against the port so she could see through reflections. Her cousin swooped by again.

  Orca turned on the speaker. She and her friend could converse only in middle speech, when one of them was in the air. The language was denser than Standard, but filmy and insubstantial compared to true speech.

  The cousins were more intelligent than human beings, though not as much more intelligent as were any of the great whales, abou
t whom Orca felt too much awe for friendship. Yet they were naive as well. Thousands of years of predation by humans had done nothing to temper that quality into cynicism or doubt. Since the revolution, whales were no longer legal prey of humans. A few outlaw whalers had tried to defy the ban, but they disappeared and no one ever saw them again. Orca’s mother knew something about that, but seldom mentioned it unless she had had a long day undersea and one brandy too many after dinner.

  The differences between whales and human beings, which Orca’s brother hardly noticed, seemed so enormous to Orca that she found it marvelous that the two species could communicate at all. There were great gaps in understanding. Humans could not understand the whales’ acceptance of events; whales could not comprehend anger or hatred, or the even more alien emotions of ambition and fear. They had concepts so far beyond human understanding that even the descriptions made no sense, even in true speech. Orca’s brother knew what they meant, but he had tried to explain them to her, both in the water and in the air, and failed every time.

  Come out of there, her cousin said. I can’t see you properly, I can barely hear you, I can’t touch you. I want to hear about what you’ve been doing.

  I know, Orca replied. I want to touch you, I want to feel the coldness of the sea at my back and the heat of your body against mine, but, oh, my friend, I can’t come with you now.

  You’re going away again, to unsounded regions.

  Don’t worry about me, Orca said. The places I’ve been haven’t harmed me, it’s only if I can’t go back that I’ll be sad.

  You are sad when you have to stay, her cousin said, and I am sad when you have to go.

  Go, to the whales, was the same word as disappear, which was in turn the same word as die. Her cousin did not mean die, but the connotation of distress was unavoidable and unmistakable. The sea was a medium in which another family, the gray whales, could sing a song one day and by the next day hear its echo — echo was the nearest concept human speech possessed, though what they and the other cetaceans and the divers heard was the song’s direct sound wave, stretched and changed by its circumnavigation of the globe.

  In the sea, intelligent beings did not disappear from hearing unless they died.

  I know, Orca said. I know, and I’m sorry. I love you.

  Her cousin slid past her, wanting her to come back into the sea and play. Play, with the cousins, involved love-play and sex-play and joy-play; the same sound sequence meant all those things.

  Orca wished she could be playing with her cousin, gliding around and through and between her songs.

  I’m sorry, she said again. If I left now, it would be like leaving a newborn underwater…

  Her cousin made a sound of surprise, for accusing someone of the ability to abandon a child to death by drowning was the worst insult one could offer.

  This acquaintance of yours is not newborn, cousin. Has he so little sense that you must care for him?

  If I don’t help him, he’ll be all alone.

  There are others.

  Yes. But he’ll only be with — Orca combined the sound sketch of a pilot with the sound sketch of a shark. Even though the result was very crude, in middle speech, a blood cousin would have understood. But the name-cousins, having evolved in an environment where nothing threatened them, found fear incomprehensible even in true speech. There was a word for it, but it was made up as a courtesy to the divers, and it meant, to the whales, a feeling their cousins had in response to potential experiences they preferred to leave unrealized. Even that was difficult for the whales to understand, for to them all potentiality was opportunity.

  I’m sorry, Orca said. He’s part of my other family. Do you understand?

  No, her cousin replied. I don’t understand. But I accept. Good-bye.

  Good-bye.

  Orca turned off the speaker and sprinted out the door. The whole interchange had taken only a few moments; she hoped she still had time to catch up to Radu.

  The elevator doors were sliding closed. She jammed her hands between them and forced them open again, then stepped calmly inside with Radu, Vasili Nikolaievich, and another young pilot named Chase.

  “What do you want?” Vaska said. She had startled him, and now his surprise was turning to anger.

  Orca shoved her hands into her pockets, hunching her shoulders. She spoke to Vasili with irritation equal to his own. “Since there isn’t any reason Radu should trust you half as far as he could throw you, there isn’t any reason why he should go with you all alone.”

  “You aren’t needed.”

  “I will be, soon enough,” Orca said. “No matter how small a ship you take, you’ll need a crew of at least two to run it, and on this flight you might have a little trouble finding volunteers.”

  “What flight?”

  “That’s part of what you didn’t want to talk about in the hall,” Radu said.

  “Oh,” said Chase. “Then you’d better wait till we’re more secure.”

  Like the divers, the pilots owned a floor of the stabilizer shaft. No one else was permitted inside who was not an invited and accompanied guest. The isolation was not only for physical privacy; they guarded against electronic invasion as well.

  “Orca,” Chase said, “we’re shielded for all modes of transmission. The feedback’s fairly severe. If you need to communicate with anyone, it would be safer to go outside our quarters.”

  “I understand,” Orca said. “Thanks.”

  Radu whispered to Orca, “What did she mean by that?”

  “About feedback? That was a tactful way of telling me not to try to use my internal communicator unless I want my skull exploded.”

  “What!”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We don’t like strangers coming into our quarters and making transmissions, either.”

  They followed Chase through several concentric rings of chambers, deeper and deeper into pilots’ quarters.

  o0o

  In the center of the pilots’ deck, in a windowless room, more pilots than Radu had ever seen before had gathered together. He recognized several who had surrounded him on Earthstation, and many he had seen in news reports, and Ramona-Teresa.

  She stood up. Beneath her shirt’s red lace inset, a triangle with its base at her collarbone and its point at her navel, her scar was a vivid white slash.

  “Well, Chase,” she said. “Well, Vaska. You finally found him.” She looked drawn and tired.

  “Found him!” Orca said. “You nearly killed him twice!”

  “Never mind, Orca,” Radu said.

  “We didn’t mean to scare him, out on deck,” Vasili said. “It was an accident.”

  “We didn’t expect you to jump off the side,” Chase said. “By the time we found a life ring that whale was swimming you toward the ferry dock.”

  “I was not anxious to be surrounded again.”

  “No, I guess not,” Chase said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think of it that way.”

  Ramona-Teresa sighed with exasperation.

  “Well, I apologize to you, too, then,” Chase said. “None of us is exactly trained for spying and kidnapping.”

  “I realize that. Still, you might have handled this more gracefully. And why did you bring the diver here?”

  “We didn’t bring either of them,” Chase said. “They brought us.”

  “Orca thinks she’s his bodyguard,” Vasili said sarcastically.

  Radu felt Orca tense with anger; he curled his fingers around hers, but he doubted he could restrain her if she chose to free herself.

  “As she’s already saved my life twice in encounters with pilots,” he said, “I’m extremely grateful to her for offering to come with me.”

  “Radu Dracul,” Ramona said, speaking so slowly and distinctly that it was clear she would not put up with another interruption or change of subject. “It’s true I… invited you to come to speak with us. But that was last night. Now is a bad time. A ship is lost —”

  “I know. That’s wh
y I’m here. To ask you to help me find Laenea.”

  After the uproar — some of it laughter — died down, and Radu explained what he believed had happened to him in transit, he had to endure an hour of skepticism, questioning, and speculations. He kept his back to a wall, and the pilots stayed farther from him than when they had been trying to frighten him. They discomforted him, but the discomfort was bearable.

  At first none of the pilots believed a word he said, and then, as they began to be intrigued by the possibilities of what he told them, they asked him to repeat random bits of his story, again and again. He answered, though he refused to discuss his friendship with Laenea beyond the fact that they were friends. It was none of their business.

  Ramona-Teresa, who understood that they had been lovers, hardly participated in the inquisition. She sat in a chair in the corner, watching and listening and smoking a cigar.

  Clearly, something strange was going on, something that had not happened before. The speculation changed focus again and again, moving from just exactly what was happening, to why it was occurring, to the ways it might damage or benefit the pilots.

  “No,” Radu said for at least the tenth time. “I don’t understand what relation my time perception has to my perception of transit. Probably none. I keep telling you, I don’t perceive transit. But it doesn’t kill me, either.” The pilots, growing more and more interested, drew closer to him. Another question probed at him. He heard the inflection, but the words blended into the background like smoke into fog, and then the noise blended into the real smoke of Ramona’s exceptionally foul-smelling cigar. Radu wanted to ask her to put it out but could not. He still found her as intimidating as the first time he had met her, and this was her territory. Someone else asked another question and he replied without even trying to hear or understand what had been said.

  “It doesn’t matter. None of this matters right now. All that matters is that I can find the lost ship, if you’ll let me — if you’ll help me. I don’t think it’s safe to waste time, either.”

  He pushed through the half-circle of pilots and fled to the farthest corner of the room, fighting to keep himself under control. He wished for a window, even one peering out into the sea. He was near crying from frustration, near collapse from the concentrated attention of all the pilots. Someone touched his arm and he flinched violently.