“Sorry,” Orca said. “Are you okay? Let’s go out on deck for a while.” The pitch of her voice was several tones higher than usual, and when Radu took her hand, her fingers were cold.
“You’re shaking,” Orca said. She chafed his hands between hers. “And I’m about to start. What is it about them?”
“Did anyone ever tell you about the safeguards ships carry, in case they get lost?”
“No. I don’t know what you mean.”
“When I knew I had no choice but to go into transit awake, Vasili gave me a vial of suicide pills, to use if whatever happened to me was too much to bear. But what they’re for is if the ship gets lost and the only other possibility is starvation or asphyxiation.” He closed his eyes, but he could feel the tears squeezing out from beneath his eyelids anyway. He could see the slender vial of shimmering translucent crystals.
Orca hugged him, offering comfort friend to friend. “I never thought about it,” she said. “I guess I just thought when you get lost, you vanish, the way it seems to the people you leave behind.”
“I don’t know how long she’ll wait,” Radu whispered. “I don’t even know how long ‘long’ is for her, in transit. But Laenea isn’t someone who holds back from — from things that need to be done.” He looked across the room at the cluster of pilots, who spoke in low tones and paid not a bit of attention to him and Orca.
“Did you hear me, Vasili Nikolaievich?” he shouted. “Don’t you remember the pills you offered me?” The pilots turned to stare at him. “Ramona-Teresa, how long do you think Laenea will wait for us? She’s too proud to choose despair.”
The older pilot left the group and strode toward him, stopping just before the point at which they would be able to touch if each extended a hand to the other.
“You need more patience, my boy, and so did Laenea. If she had waited to understand herself better, it’s possible she and Miikala would never have been lost. Perhaps none of this would have happened.”
He was ready to fight to keep her from declaring Laenea dead and gone. He started to speak, but she silenced him with a quick, sharp motion of her hand.
“If we find them —” she said.
“Ramona,” Vasili said angrily, “I think you’re letting your personal feelings —”
She needed only a glance to silence Vasili. She shook her head, and began again. “If you find Laenea,” Ramona-Teresa said to Radu, “she’ll still be a pilot, and you — I don’t know what you are, but if we tried to make you into a pilot, the process would kill you. Do you understand that? That part of it cannot change.”
“I understand,” Radu said. “I understand that she’s suited to being a pilot and I am not. I understand that the transition back —”
Ramona-Teresa narrowed her eyes.
“— is seldom made successfully, and would not be attempted even if it were simple.” That was as far as his pride allowed him to go. If the pilots thought he wanted Laenea to give up all her ambitions and all her dreams and destroy herself for him, then they did not understand why he loved her, or why — he believed — she had loved him.
Ramona-Teresa’s expression cleared. “The patience will come with time. For now, you’re right to be impatient.” She turned her attention to Orca. “You know what’s planned? You understand the danger?”
“Yes, pilot, I do.”
“Yet you wish to crew this ship?”
“You can hardly take someone along who doesn’t know what they’re getting into.”
“Ah, good. You also understand that no one else must know of the attempt before we leave. The administrators —” She glanced at Radu and laughed, a clear and hopeful sound after so much silence and grim discussion. “If you think we’re slow to make decisions, Radu Dracul, you should spend some time with the administrators. You will, if your mission succeeds. You’ll learn patience then.”
Chapter 9
Some deceit was necessary, but Ramona-Teresa had so much seniority that by the time she, Vasili, Radu, and Orca booked passage on the shuttle and returned to Earthstation, a ship waited to take her home for the leave she had requested. Anyone on the crew, and nearly all the other pilots, would have had to wait for a scheduled flight, but this was a courtesy owed to Ramona-Teresa, which she had never before demanded. It would have been refused, of course, if the administrators had known what she really planned to do with their ship.
They would surely have suspected something if they had known about the extra equipment Vasili talked out of a friend in the x-team planning section. The administrators had given up looking for lost ships years ago and would have forbidden the waste of resources to search for one now.
Radu wished Vasili were staying behind. But Ramona had chosen him because, of all the pilots, he was best. Officially, he was to pilot Ramona home, then fly the ship back to earth.
They boarded the transit ship and undocked from Earthstation. Vasili began working out a course to the transit point that had begun Laenea’s training.
“This ship is off course,” the computer’s voice said, when the display lights flickered from dead center. “Shall I bring up second level navigational aids?”
“Shut down the cerebral functions,” Vasili said. “The last thing I need is a lecture.”
Radu obeyed, cutting off the helpful protest by shunting the computer to transit mode.
“P-2709, this is Earthstation. We show you drifting, pilot, are you having difficulties?”
“No difficulties, Earthstation, I show no drift.”
“You’re drifting, pilot, you’re half a radian off course and several degrees above the plane.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Ramona drew Orca out of the transmitter’s pickup area.
“Orca, get to sleep quickly. They’ll be screaming at us in a moment, and when they realize we’re going to use the wrong transit point they might even send someone after us. We won’t have time to circle back.”
“Okay,” Orca said. “Good luck.”
Radu accompanied her to her sleep chamber. She had already prepared it. Radu hugged her, memorizing the pressure of her arms around him, the touch of her strong hands on his back. She kissed him on the throat, at the corner of his jaw. His pulse beat against the light pressure of her lips. She had not kissed him before, and Radu had time only to wonder, not to ask, if she meant more by it than the customary parting.
Orca pulled away from him slowly, sliding her hands along his back and his sides and then grasping his forearms.
“Good luck,” she said again.
“I’m very glad not to be all alone,” Radu said.
“A big lot of good I’ll be, sound asleep, but —” She shrugged, stepped inside her body box, and sat down. “But there’s no help for it.” She grinned. “Unless you figure out what it is you do, and teach the rest of us.” She double checked to be sure the programming was correct.
“Radu —”
“Yes?”
She glanced away, then looked at him intently. “Well, hell. It isn’t as if you’re a pilot. What did you see?”
Radu blinked, not understanding her. Then he laughed. Orca sat back, frowning.
“Never mind,” she said. “Forget it.” She reached for the anesthetic mask.
Radu stopped her. “No, don’t yet, I’m sorry. I only laughed because I haven’t even thought about it since —”
“Why should you? You know.”
He shook his head. “That’s just it. I don’t. I didn’t see anything — there was nothing to see. It was like looking out into thick fog, fog that went on forever, with nothing even concealed inside it.”
“You mean it’s all lies? All these years and mysteries and we’ve been wondering about lies?”
“I don’t know,” Radu said. “Maybe what makes us different from pilots is we can’t see what’s really out there. Or maybe what makes them different from us is that they create what they experience. I just don’t know.”
“‘Who knows, with
pilots?’” Orca said softly.
Radu’s sense of time tugged itself into a conscious thought. “The alarm is about to go off, Orca, you only have a few minutes to get to sleep.”
“Okay,” she said, and patted his arm. “Take care of yourself out there.” She lay back, pulled the mask over her mouth and nose, and breathed deeply. Soon her pupils dilated, and her eyelids drooped. Radu unlaced her red shoes, slipped them off her feet, and stowed them under her sleep chamber. The boxes were of standard size, so she looked very small inside one. Radu had the momentary urge to find a blanket and tuck it in around her. Instead, he closed the lid over her and stood up.
Ramona-Teresa came into the box room as the automatic alarm chimed its warning.
“She’s asleep,” Radu said.
“Good. As far as the instruments are concerned, so are you.” She left the room again. Radu did not take her rapid departure as an insult; she, too, had to prepare herself for transit. Neither Ramona-Teresa nor Vasili Nikolaievich could risk having their concentration or their biocontrol disturbed.
The seconds flowed away. Radu considered, one last time, what he was trying to do. It was no better than a game in which a possible solution was death, a game for which he did not know all the rules. But the prize for winning was very great, and it was too late to resign from the competition.
He spun around to face the port just in time to watch starry black space fade delicately to silver gray. He stopped moving, stopped breathing, awaiting the changes that would begin if his strange ability had only been temporary. But it was just the same as last time: Nothing happened at all. He returned to the control room.
The pilots had put on their oxygen tanks and breathing masks. Vasili was watching something move across his field of view — something invisible, as far as Radu was concerned. Ramona-Teresa focused her gaze on infinity.
“I’m going to follow the flight plan Miikala filed,” Vasili said, “as near as I can, anyway.” He took a breath. When he spoke again, sarcasm slid into his voice. “And then I suppose you want to take over piloting.”
“I don’t know yet,” Radu said calmly.
“You won’t have much time to decide what to do, because theirs was a short flight,” the pilot said, “and we can’t just keep going indefinitely, or there’s no telling where we’ll end up.” He breathed from his oxygen mask.
“Maybe that’s what happened to them.”
“I keep trying to make you understand how this works,” Vasili said so angrily that he had to stop immediately and take another isolated breath. “You’re all right if you know your starting point and your destination, or your start and a familiar route, you can go a little way beyond, but not indefinitely without coming out and taking a look, because you get lost.” He turned his back on Radu and began working on the interface between the ship’s computer and the computer he had liberated from the exploration team.
“Let’s wait until we reach the end of Miikala’s flight plan before we worry about what to do, Vaska,” Ramona said mildly, then, turning to Radu, “and since if you did perceive Laenea you did it while you were asleep, I suggest you try to go to sleep now and see what happens.”
“I guess I should,” Radu said. He hesitated, looking out into the gray viewscreen. He felt an unreasonable reluctance to take Ramona’s advice, sensible though it was. If he went to sleep and did not dream of Laenea, that would mean, to him, that she was dead.
Only when Vasili glanced at him with a quizzical expression did Radu leave the control room.
In the crew lounge, he kicked off his boots and lay on the couch. He shifted around, trying to get comfortable, but after a while he gave up trying to force himself to sleep. He got up again.
After the past few days he should feel exhausted, but he was wide awake and restless, alert and nervous. In transit, he still felt reluctant to give himself up to normal sleep.
He was tempted to make himself a cup of coffee, but that would further delay what he needed to do. And he already knew how useless sleep drugs would be.
He poked around in the galley — no matter what happened on this flight, he still had the least seniority of anyone on board and was therefore, he assumed, responsible for the cooking.
The ordinary tasks helped to relax him. He rested his elbows on the narrow ledge and stared out into the grayness. His description to Orca had been slightly inaccurate. Fog, indeed, but not a great depth of it. It had no depth. One did not so much look into it as at it. It had neither form nor texture, and only his imagination gave it the bright sparkles at the edge of his vision.
Perhaps he would see more if he stared long enough; perhaps it was sensory deprivation that created whatever the pilots saw.
He did not believe that.
Yet gradually, imperceptibly, the soft gray soothed him. He yawned, and he felt the wandering of his attention, the softly distracted state of mind, brought on by sleepiness. He breathed very slowly and regularly, long deep breaths with as little concentration as he could manage: He let his conscious thoughts sink down and away. The sounds of his body, his steady breathing, his strong, slow heartbeat, blended into the low vibration of the ship’s engines. It was too much trouble to take the few steps to the couch, too much effort to fight the great lethargy overwhelming him. He sank down, sliding his hands along the cool glass and the muted swirls of color on the wall. He curled up on the deck, his back pressed into the corner’s comforting solidity, his cheek resting on his arm, and, there, he fell asleep.
o0o
Radu felt cold. He shivered uncontrollably and his fingers and toes lost all feeling as he fought his way through an impenetrable snowstorm. Walking on ground that was flat and featureless, he moved slowly with his arms outstretched. He could see only as far as his hands could reach. But he encountered no obstructions, no trees, no brush, no irregularities of the land. And there was no sound: Even his footsteps were completely muffled.
The storm continued, but he could make out a faint path beneath the drifted covering.
Radu broke every rule he had ever learned about surviving in the wilderness. He was lost and he should stay still, but here he was, plowing through shin-deep powder snow to follow a nearly obliterated path. He should stay still, so he could be found.
So he could be found: He laughed.
Seconds were the only measure of the distance that he traveled, and without thinking about it he kept track of them. The path made a right-angle turn. Radu followed.
At the second turn, he stopped short.
He knew how easy it was to become confused and disoriented while lost. Without a point of reference, distance and direction were meaningless. He looked back over his track but could not see where he had turned before, and the path he had broken was rapidly filling in.
There was no way to prove it, no way even to demonstrate it to himself, but he was certain in his own mind that this third path lay perpendicular to the other two. Yet the ground was still monotonously flat, and the only dimension left over was up and down.
He turned along the third path reluctantly. It was solid and reassuring, it felt just the same; he experienced no awkward change in gravity and the snow still fell from “up.”
When the fourth path appeared, perpendicular to the other three, he nearly succeeded in finding it all quite funny.
When he was younger, studying elementary mathematics, he had conquered three-dimensional geometry by brute force. Four spatial dimensions had fought him to a draw; he could manipulate the formulae but not visualize what they represented. Five dimensions had ambushed him and left him so bruised he did not even have an ambition for revenge. Yet he turned onto a fifth path, which again lay perpendicular to all the rest, and he navigated it quite easily.
How long could this go on? He had heard of, though never studied, geometries with an infinity of dimensions.
His body was tiring. His brain began playing tricks, out of boredom, with imaginary sounds and imaginary lights. Radu wished for even so little
of reality as the faint crinkle of heavy snowflakes falling.
In the quiet he thought he heard someone calling him.
“Laenea?”
He received no reply.
At the same time, the blizzard thinned for a moment and he could see the next turning.
He stepped gingerly onto the sixth path, and kept on walking.
It went on so long that he began to believe he had made a mistake. The indentation in the silver surface of the snow was so faint he feared he had lost it and was following an illusion. But he had kept careful watch for another turnoff. He had seen none, and at certain angles the trace before him was plainly visible. He was a good tracker, when the skill was required, back on Twilight. The path was there. The snow had piled so deeply that it slowed his pace and tired him even more rapidly than before. By his own reckoning, he had been traveling for nearly five hours. He wondered if he had been gone that long from the pilots’ point of view, and, if he had, if they could tell. Perhaps he had caused their ship to become lost.
Strangely enough, the prospect bothered Radu very little.
The snow was treacherous. He slipped and fell to his hands and knees; he struggled to rise, too fast, and slipped again, falling hard and painfully. Lying flat in the snow, he could hear his heart pounding, faster and faster. The sound filled his ears and bright lights exploded into darkness before him. He flung his arms across his eyes, crying out.
Radu made himself be calm. He dragged himself back into control of his body and he forced himself to remember where he was and what he was doing. Cautiously lifting his head from his arms, he pushed himself up on his elbows. He opened his eyes, and saw the next turn: the turn into the seventh dimension.
He struggled to his feet and looked down at the seventh path. He did not know how many more of these he could face; what made it worse was that he did not know how many he might have to face.
The voice called to him again. Despite the snow, the weight of the silence itself, Laenea’s voice reached him, clear and close.
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