“Yes,” Radu said. “I do. It’s all right. And I’m all right. We’ve got to keep going — we can’t give up now.”
She smiled slowly, sadly. “You think we’ll find them, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m afraid to believe you, but I’m beginning to.”
Vasili swung his chair around. “Are you two done arguing?”
“Yes, Vaska, I think that we are.”
“Then I’m taking us back into transit,” Vasili said. “Right… now.”
Radu hoped — the universe turned gray — for something more. Disappointed, but resigned, he let the seconds start ticking away again, taking him closer and closer to the final intersection, where the only test that counted lay.
o0o
“How much longer?” Vasili asked.
“What?” Radu could not believe a pilot had asked such a question. “The last time I tried to tell you that, you screamed at me. Why do you want to know something that’s meaningless to you? And dangerous as well?”
“Go ahead and tell me — if you can make sense out of space here, maybe I can make sense of time.”
“Sense!” Radu burst out laughing.
“Just tell me if it’s soon.”
“It’s soon.”
The time passed, and Radu searched the viewport for anything, even a depth to the faceless gray. He began a silent countdown of the seconds in his mind.
“I’m going to have to turn,” Vasili said. “We’re headed straight for an anomaly.”
One of the bright hallucinations glimmered, not at the edge of Radu’s vision, but in the center, and this time it remained. He blinked, expecting it to vanish like the others.
Instead it widened, and at the same time its substance coalesced, the colors intensifying and thickening, intertwining and parting like the threads of a tapestry.
“Did you hear me?” Vasili cried. “If this is where Miikala and Laenea went, they’re gone, forever, and we’ll be lost, too!”
Radu stayed completely still, afraid that any motion, any glance away, would send the pattern to the edge of his sight, there to vanish.
“Ramona!” Vasili shouted.
“Yes, turn, quickly!”
“No, Vasili, don’t!”
The younger pilot swung the ship from the shiny crazed surface. Radu lunged. He shouldered Vasili out of the way, knocking him to the deck. The controls were warm in his hands. He forced them against the whole momentum of the ship, and the lurch penetrated the artificial gravity. Radu staggered and almost fell. The enormous patch, glazed with deep color, wider and higher than the ship, opened out to receive them. It became a soap bubble, lucid, transparent, an aurora that spun curtains even more intense than those of the flaming skies of Twilight. It was a solid coruscation of curvetting fire.
Radu guided the ship straight into it.
Vasili screamed.
The transit ship shuddered. Radu expected, any moment, a breach of the hull, the shriek of escaping air, the slow end of sound. But the ship passed into the aurora, and the aurora passed into the ship. Through dimensions Radu had imagined but could not describe, the color rained upon him and passed through his skin and flesh and bones. He shivered as it touched him. He felt that he could reach out and sweep the universe up in his arms, from its beginning to its end.
For that moment, he understood what pilots knew about transit.
Radu slumped down in the pilot’s chair, dazzled and confounded. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Everything around him, machines and people, was surrounded by light and shadows. He rubbed his eyes, but the shadows remained.
Vasili pulled himself up from the deck, lurched at Radu, and grabbed the front of his shirt.
“What did you see? Tell me what you saw!”
Radu stared at his hand, fascinated by the multiple images, scared and exhilarated at the same time. He reached out to make Vasili release his grip, but as soon as he touched him, the young pilot cursed and snatched his hand away. Radu wanted to feel sorry for him, he wanted to feel anger toward him, but he could spare the attention for neither.
“Dammit, tell me —”
“Vasili, Radu,” Ramona said softly, “look.”
She pointed at the viewport.
Don’t block it out, this time, Radu thought. Don’t persuade yourself that you can’t see anything.
He turned, slowly, and looked where Ramona was pointing.
A set of images like broken shards of a mirror: Before them lay the irregular silver and shadow twinkle of another transit ship.
Ramona took the controls. Intently, she guided their ship toward the other one.
Vasili snarled a curse and tried to pull Radu from the pilot’s chair. Radu stood, gingerly testing his changed perceptions. He gazed down at Vasili, seeking out the true image among the multitude of similar reflections.
“I’d tell you what I saw if I could,” he said. “Please believe me. It’s just that I haven’t figured it out myself yet.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Stop it, both of you,” Ramona said angrily, “and prepare for docking.”
She docked the ship noisily, messily; the two craft clanged together and the fittings locked and held as momentum and inertia combined to give an awkward spin. Without pausing to correct, she jumped up and rushed toward the airlock. Ignoring Vasili, Radu hurried after her.
He crashed into a wall, banging his shoulder hard. Tears filled his eyes, further fragmenting the multiple visions. He shook his head, scrubbing his sleeve across his eyes. The airlock started its cycle. He moved toward it, feeling his way along the passage.
Ramona stepped into the other ship. Radu hesitated. The pilot’s footsteps echoed and re-echoed. He followed.
She did not pause in the darkened box room, but Radu stopped. The sensors and instrument lights gave off a vague glow. Radu bent over a sleep chamber, trying to make out the calibration. All he could be sure of was that it registered activity.
“Ramona, the crew member’s alive,” he said.
She kept on going.
“Laenea —” Radu meant to shout, but her name came out in a whisper.
He followed Ramona into the crew lounge. She stopped so suddenly that he almost ran into her, then she took a few hesitant steps, and stopped again. A body lay on the couch. The sheet covering it obscured its outlines.
Radu saw a man living, a man dead, a man decayed. He gasped, watching the transition to ashes.
Ramona drew the sheet away and gazed down at Miikala’s body in silence.
There was only grief in her expression, not revulsion or fear or surprise: She could not be seeing what Radu had seen. Miikala’s body was reality for her. Radu could make sense of the rest of the images only as projections from the past, from the future, as if spatial dimensions and time had become equally accessible to him.
Radu was over being startled and he could not be repelled, for he had seen far worse deaths on Twilight. Trying not to shut himself off completely from what he had learned to see, but knowing he must simplify it or be as good as blind, Radu gradually projected each shadow back onto a single reality that he chose as best he could. The process was something like drawing a three-dimensional cube onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper, something like changing the focus of his eyes from very far away to very near.
Slowly he brought himself to a world where the shadows did not blot out the objects, a world less overwhelming to his senses. But it was not what it had been before. He doubted it ever would be what it had been before.
Ramona knelt at Miikala’s side and touched his throat, seeking — surely not a pulse, but warmth, some sign of life. Radu wished he could touch her, draw back her hand, embrace her without causing her pain, for she could only find sorrow here. Miikala was dead.
Even if Miikala had committed suicide, Radu knew Laenea would not leave a crew member to wake up when the anesthetic ran out, to die horribly and alone.
He walked pas
t Ramona and into the control room.
One hand dangling to the floor, Laenea lay sprawled in the pilot’s chair, her breathing mask over her face, the instruments blinking around her. Radu approached, terrified, afraid of seeing again the transition to bones and ashes.
“Laenea?” His voice broke.
Her hand moved. He started violently at the faint sound of her fingertips brushing the deck.
And then she stretched, and pushed away the mask, and yawned. She shook back her hair, just the way she had during the few days they had been together, when he watched her awaken from a sound sleep.
“Laenea —”
She leaped to her feet, spinning around to face him, her long black hair tangled.
“Radu!” She looked around, still half asleep and confused. “I was dreaming about you — I’m still dreaming, I must be!”
“No, this is real. We came to find you.”
He began to smile; she laughed, her wonderful, open laugh of delight and surprise; Radu’s smile turned into his absurd and embarrassing giggle, bubbling up with joy. They threw themselves into each other’s arms, in a long, unbelieving embrace. Neither cared that one was a pilot and the other was not.
“How can you be here?” She pulled back a little; she touched the base of his throat where the pilot’s scar would end, if he had one. “You aren’t a pilot, but you’re awake — and alive —”
“I don’t know how to explain. I woke up in transit. I knew your ship was in trouble.”
“In trouble —? But —” She ran out of breath, grabbed her mask, and took a deep gulp of oxygen. “Sorry, I’m not used to that yet.”
“They declared your ship lost. But… something… happened to me in transit. I knew you were out here, and alive.”
“How could they declare the ship lost? It hasn’t been here very long. I mean it doesn’t feel like very long. How long has it been?” She reached for her mask again; she was not yet proficient at conserving her breath and speaking in long single sentences, like the more experienced pilots.
“Your ship is two weeks late, and that’s after they gave it the maximum for the trip itself.”
She shook her head. “I suppose you understand how hard it is to keep track of time here.”
“I’ve been told. Repeatedly.”
“I only just sat down to sort things through, and to try to figure out how to get home,” she said. “I guess I fell asleep. After Miikala…” Her voice trailed off; she glanced over Radu’s shoulder. “You couldn’t have come here all by yourself, surely —?”
“No. I persuaded the pilots to help me. Vasili, and Ramona-Teresa —”
“Ramona! Is she here? Where?”
“She was with me — in the other room.”
“Oh, no…”
“What is it?”
“Miikala’s in there.”
“I know. I saw… do you see things differently, here?”
She ignored his question. “Radu, Miikala and Ramona were lovers, they’ve been lovers since before they were pilots.” She hurried toward the other room. Radu followed.
Of course, he thought. He felt ashamed, chagrined, and stupid. All the clues came back to him, now that it was too late to do anything about them. Until now he had been oblivious to them, and now it was too late. He had abandoned Ramona to her grief.
She was kneeling beside the couch, staring at Miikala. Laenea knelt beside her and embraced her. Radu stood helplessly nearby.
“What happened? How did you get here? What did he mean, experimenting with a novice in the ship? Did he lose hope when you were lost? Oh, damn.”
Laenea held her. Radu, knowing how Ramona felt, how she must have felt since hearing of the lost ship, wanted to add his comfort to Laenea’s. His hopes had raised Ramona’s, and now she was betrayed. He remained where he was, knowing his touch would only hurt her.
“It was only supposed to be a training flight, that’s true. We went into transit — Oh, Ramona!”
“I know, my dear.” Ramona spoke softly, her eyes closed, tears heavy on her thick black eyelashes.
“But at the end of the flight, when he said we had to turn back, it was as if he’d let me sit at the controls of an airplane but never take off.”
Ramona-Teresa drew back in surprise. “You saw it? You, Laenea? The first time?”
“I showed him, and then he could see it too. Just like that. So we went into it, to see what it was like. I saw — I felt —” She stopped. “I don’t have the right words. He’d only started to teach me.”
“Even Miikala didn’t have the words for what you’ve done,” Ramona said. Her voice shook. Her composure finally shattered. The stolid, independent pilot hid her face against Laenea’s shoulder, and the younger woman held her, rocking her gently. Radu knew how the possibility of joy could intensify grief; joy was nothing when one was all alone.
“He was ecstatic, Ramona,” Laenea said. “He explained what seventh would mean. We explored it a little way. I thought he was only getting tired. But then he… he had a seizure. A stroke. I don’t know. I tried to revive him…” She looked away from Ramona, at Miikala’s body. “I know he never felt any pain. But he’d still be alive, if I hadn’t—”
“You don’t know that!” Ramona said angrily. She dashed the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, and then she spoke more calmly. “Perhaps it was seventh that killed him, but you aren’t to blame, you — tell yourself this isn’t a bad place or a bad time for a pilot to die.” She stopped, as her voice almost broke. “It’s what I’ll be telling myself.”
She started to cry again, and Laenea kept holding her.
“Come away,” Laenea said, “come away.” She led Ramona from Miikala’s side, back to the control room and to the pilot’s chair.
“I’m all right,” Ramona said. “I’ll be all right.” Laenea knelt beside her, holding her hands.
“Did you get into seventh?”
Radu started. Vasili stood in the shadows of the hatchway, the sharp planes of his face softened by patterns of light.
“We’re in it, Vasili,” Laenea said, calmly, gently. “You’re in it all the time.”
“Then where is it, what does it look like?”
“Can’t you see it? It’s all around, once you’ve perceived it you can’t lose it again.” She glanced at Radu. “You can see it, Radu, can’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I can.”
“You’re lying,” Vasili said to both of them. “Anyone can claim a perception and try to get the credit, but who’ll care if you can’t show it to the rest of us? I don’t believe you!”
“I’m getting very tired of being called a liar!” Radu said angrily.
Laenea kept her temper. “Vasili… you brought exploration equipment, I assume?”
“Yes, of course, we didn’t come out here to get lost along with you.”
“Good.” Laenea stabbed at a control. The ships fell out of transit and the universe opened out around them. “Now look.”
The stars lay spread in strange patterns. Knowing they had left their galaxy, and must be in some other, made Radu feel a little frightened.
Laenea gazed quite calmly at space and the stars.
The longer Radu stared, the stranger the stars appeared. He thought, for a while, that he had lost his ability to project the new images back on themselves.
Ramona let her breath out in a long sigh. Radu looked more carefully, and overcame his misperceptions.
Each star — each patch of light, for they were patches and not points, patches indistinct around the edges where the density of matter thinned out — each was a single galaxy. And farther away… each of those bright patches must be a whole galactic cluster.
“Where are we?” Vasili whispered.
“We are,” Ramona said, “where you have wished to come, for so long.”
All of time and space lay beyond the port; the little ships hung at the end of the universe, billions of light-years, billions of years, f
rom its origins. Vasili placed his hand flat on the glass. Radu could not tell if he were reaching for the star clusters, or trying to push them away.
Radu’s gaze met Laenea’s.
“Do you understand?” she said softly.
“Not enough,” he said.
She grinned. “Me, either. Not yet, anyway. But I will.”
For the first time, for Radu, Laenea was a pilot. He could see the change in her bearing and her manner. Luminous, serene, she touched Radu’s cheek.
It was, he feared, the last touch between them. Nothing he had done or seen could overcome the essential disharmony between pilots and ordinary human beings.
Radu covered Laenea’s hand with his own. He kissed her palm, then slowly let his hand fall. She gazed at him a moment longer, nodded, and drew back as Radu, too, stepped away.
Laenea touched a control. The ship silently and smoothly rotated. The galaxies slid from the viewport.
In the other direction lay… nothing.
Interstellar space is deep black, touched richly with stars. Even the featureless shadows of hard vacuum could not match the complete absence of light that faced Radu now. He tried to open out the darkness, to let images expand to include a future or a past. But there was nothing there, no stars, no galaxies, no light or heat or radiation. Nothing was there and nothing ever had been there. He was looking into a place that did not yet exist and never would exist. The universe, still expanding, would engulf it, and it never would have been.
The ship continued to turn till the galaxies swept into view once more. Ramona sat back in the pilot’s chair as if she were exhausted, and Vasili made an inarticulate sound of confusion, and fury. Radu felt stunned. Laenea touched another control and neutralized the spin.
“That’s hard to look at for long,” she said. “Now do you believe me, Vasili? We couldn’t be here, except by going into seventh.”
Superluminal Page 21
