Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “True,” Vasili said with a sort of grim and self-destructive pleasure. He strode from the control room.

  “Why can’t he see it?” Laenea said. “All you have to do is look.”

  “It isn’t that simple,” Ramona said. “All the pilots can see fourth, but only half of us can perceive fifth, and half of those, sixth. As for seventh — I had my chance, and Vasili had his, when Radu brought us here. But we were oblivious to what he sensed, and to what you understand.”

  Radu rubbed his hands over his face, pressing his fingers against his eyes to shut out, for the moment, the light of the universe past and present and future. He knew the respite had to be a short one; his understanding had come more slowly, but no less surely. The implications, though, would take much longer to discover. He felt very tired.

  He steadied himself and let his hands fall to his sides. Ramona stayed where she was, her shoulders slumped, while Laenea leaned over her computer, which had interfaced with Vasili’s and the x team’s. An enormous mass of data scrolled rapidly through the air.

  When it finally stopped, Laenea whistled, a low sound of relief. “Before you came,” she said, “I was afraid I’d spend the rest of my life trying to get back by successive approximation.” She faced Radu. “What you must have had to go through to make them listen — thank you, Radu.”

  He looked into her eyes.

  It isn’t fair, he thought, we ought to be even closer, but we aren’t, we can’t be.

  His love for her, and his admiration, were as strong as ever; and the physical attraction was undiminished.

  “It wasn’t something I thought about,” he said. “It wasn’t something I had to decide.”

  She smiled.

  “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 11

  Orca woke slowly. At first her vision refused to clear. She blinked at the fuzzy lights overhead, trying to force them back into focus. She pushed away the anesthetic mask. The smell of the chemical had already faded, but she felt like curling up and going back to sleep. She wished she were in the sea, in a remote harbor, floating and sinking and rising with a pod of napping killer whales.

  Her knees and her back felt stiff and sore. She raised the lid of her sleep chamber and climbed out, wishing as she seldom had before that someone were there to help her. She had expected to see Radu. But if something had gone wrong, if the stress of transit had suddenly caught up with him…

  She slipped into her gold mesh vest and padded barefoot out of the box room.

  Radu, hurrying down the corridor, stopped when he saw her.

  “You’re okay,” she said with relief.

  He nodded.

  “Where are we?” Orca said. Her shoulders ached. She rubbed her collarbone. “It feels like we’ve come a long way.”

  “I’ll show you,” Radu said.

  She followed him into the deserted control room. She stopped, astonished.

  Galaxies spread out in clumps and clusters before her, endless concentrations of stars in hazy spirals, some of them dark red, dying. The ship had passed beyond any region of single stars.

  “A long way,” she said again, very softly.

  The implications began to come clear. Orca walked to the viewport and leaned her forehead against it, cupping her hands around her face to screen off reflections.

  “Turn down the lights, please,” Radu said to the computer, and it complied. Orca stood in the dark, her hands pressed to the glass. She felt as if she could dissolve right through it, she wanted to dissolve right through it, to embrace the whole universe with her body and fling the molecules of her being into the void.

  Her vision clouded. She blinked, but the glass had misted over. Tears ran down her face.

  “Orca — don’t, please, we’re not lost.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “I didn’t mean to scare you. We aren’t lost.”

  “I know,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t afraid of that, I wasn’t afraid…” She stopped, unable to explain. “I don’t care…” She held him, trying to ease his concern, and needing the solidity and touch of another human being to temper her excitement. Starlight, galaxy-light, gave the only illumination. It glinted off Radu’s dark blond hair and his high cheekbones. Orca wished transit ships had more ports, or that they had been built of some transparent material, so she could bathe in the light of the universe.

  “You must have traveled through seventh,” she said. “You must have discovered it!”

  “Laenea discovered it. I only found her.”

  Orca drew away from Radu and turned to the port again. She looked down, nearly parallel to the ship’s surface. The docking hatch lay out of sight, but she could see the curve of Laenea’s training ship beyond the search craft’s flank.

  As Radu told her Laenea’s tale, Orca listened in silence, nodding now and then, hearing and understanding what he said to her, but increasingly distracted by the sight of the universe.

  “Radu,” she said suddenly, “what’s on the other side?”

  He avoided glancing back at the port. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Darkness — you can’t even call it that. More than an absence of light. I can’t explain. Laenea would show it to you. I’m not ready to see it again.” He changed the subject abruptly. “I’d better fix lunch,” he said, turning away. “Everybody must be getting hungry.” He spoke as if his pedestrian duties could erase the extraordinary thing he had done.

  “Radu —”

  Orca reached toward him. Though she was behind him, out of his sight, he tensed before she touched him.

  She let her hand fall.

  “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

  He nodded without speaking and walked away.

  Orca let him go, all alone, and hoped that was the right thing to do.

  o0o

  After Radu had already begun chopping up the vegetables, he noticed that the meal he had chosen to prepare took longer than anything else he knew how to make. He could have put everything through the preparer in the galley, and quite probably everyone would laugh at him if they realized he had not done so. But he was beyond caring what any of the others thought. The work was comforting. Slicing through onions and bok choy in a steady rhythm gave him something to concentrate on other than seventh, other than his new perceptions, other than the edge.

  He tasted the sauce. It had no taste. He added pippali, more than he should have, and a handful of chopped ginger.

  He felt the radial acceleration as the linked ships slid into a slow, gentle spin. After half a turn, a counterthrust stopped them. Radu shut his eyes, then opened them again. With his eyes closed it was all too easy to let the petals of dimension open out onto an endless abyss.

  Radu Dracul shivered.

  o0o

  When Laenea turned the ships to face the edge, Orca gazed at it, into it. It lay just beyond the port; no, it lay forever beyond vision or understanding.

  “Turn the ship around.” Vasili’s voice was haunted and strained.

  “No!” Orca said.

  “Laenea —”

  “Don’t look at it if you don’t like it,” Orca said.

  “It’d be there, all the same, I’d know it, I’d feel it.”

  “It’s there, even when we aren’t facing it!”

  Vasili reached for the controls. Ramona put her hand over his. “Vaska, it isn’t going to jump in and eat us.”

  His shoulders stiff with anger, Vasili strode from the control room.

  Ramona hesitated, sighed, and finally got up and followed him.

  “Laenea, what’s out there?” Orca asked softly.

  “I wish I knew,” Laenea said. “I tried to figure it out, but beyond where we are, the transit equations haven’t any solutions. We’ve come just about as far as we can.”

  Orca kept staring at the edge. Laenea busied herself at the control console.

  Quite some time later, the ship began a slow spin. Orca made a sound of protest,
or supplication.

  “Sorry,” Laenea said. “But I don’t much like it looming over me, either. Orca, can you get your ship ready, please? We’ll have to use its engines, too, to get home.”

  Orca stood, reluctant, still staring at the viewport. Now it held a field of galaxies.

  “Yes…” she said. “All right…” She left Laenea’s ship. She felt both enlarged and diminished by what she had seen, and all she knew for certain was that she wanted to explore it until she understood its secrets.

  Now she knew how her brother felt when he dove into the sea until its depths sliced away all the sunlight. She knew why he loved it, and why he would never leave.

  o0o

  Radu felt the ships spin again, returning to their original orientation. He wondered how Orca, down in Laenea’s control room, had reacted to the sight of the edge.

  It will excite her, he thought. It won’t surprise her any more than she was surprised by seeing constellations formed by galaxies instead of stars. She can swim across an ocean all alone, or accompanied by a predator that would terrify any ordinary human being. The edge of reality would not frighten Orca.

  He scraped his knife a few times across the sharpening stone, then went back to chopping everything very fine.

  o0o

  Orca climbed down into the engines. She found stress wear even more severe than the damage she felt within her own body. The distance they had come had penetrated all the protective mechanisms of sleep and shielding. She signaled the computer for the schematics, replaced three circuit splinters, and reached into a net. She pushed herself into the heightened state of awareness she needed to heal the frayed luminescent connections. The energy flux tingled through her hands and along the edges of her finger webbing.

  o0o

  Radu flicked on the intercom.

  “Lunch, everybody,” he said.

  Laenea came in a minute later, Ramona soon thereafter. Radu finished slicing a green onion, swept the pieces onto the edge of his knife, and scattered them across the soup for garnish.

  “Smells good,” Laenea said. “Is it —”

  “What’s that smell?” Vasili put all his disappointment and disgust over the whole trip into those three words.

  “Lunch,” Radu said, without apology. He was thoroughly sick of Vasili’s bad humor.

  “I can’t eat it.” The young pilot stormed back to his cabin.

  Ramona made as if to go after him but Laenea touched her arm and she stopped.

  “Let him sulk, Ramona. Come have some lunch. It smells wonderful.”

  Ramona allowed Laenea to lead her to her place at the head of the table.

  “I’m not very hungry,” she said apologetically to Radu. “But Laenea’s right, it does smell good.”

  Laenea glanced at Radu, struggled not to laugh, and broke out giggling. He gave her a quizzical look.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You looked so funny, when Vaska said he wouldn’t eat lunch. Poor Vaska, he hasn’t even the sense not to insult the cook when he’s holding a butcher knife!”

  Radu wiped off the blade and put the knife away. “I forgot I had it,” he said. “Go ahead and start. I’ll get Orca.”

  He went to the engine room hatchway and called her. He expected to hear her climbing the ladder, but silence was the only response. He went down to look for her.

  She was sitting crosslegged on the floor, her chin on her fist, faint frown lines of intense concentration on her forehead. Radu sat on his heels beside her. The light from circuit interstices flowed over her.

  “Orca?”

  She stayed where she was, without answering; she took a long, deep breath, and let it out again. She blinked slowly and looked at him.

  “Lunch,” he said lamely.

  It was a quiet meal. Laenea, having recovered from her fit of laughter, complimented Radu on the taste as well as the smell of the soup, then lapsed into a thoughtful silence. Vasili remained in his cabin. Orca responded to nothing more complicated than “Pass the soy sauce.” Ramona picked at her food for a few minutes, then murmured a word of apology and left the galley. Orca watched her go, and soon thereafter, without another word, got up and followed her.

  “I don’t think they meant it as a comment on your cooking,” Laenea said.

  “I know they didn’t,” Radu said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t expect anyone to act as if this trip were ordinary. I’m surprised I feel as normal as I do.”

  “I feel better than normal,” Laenea said. “I’m sorry about Miikala, I’m sorry Vasili is disappointed. But I can’t help it. I feel wonderful.”

  o0o

  Orca paused just inside the control room where Ramona-Teresa sat all alone with the lights out. The diver thought about seeing deeper into the infrared. Ramona became a deep glow, motionless and silent. The strangeness of pilots intensified in the darkness. At night Orca could see the pulse of ordinary people. Pilots changed their blood pressure without any definite rhythm. The bright strokes of the veins in Ramona’s throat suddenly faded and her skin darkened to deep red.

  “Ramona-Teresa,” Orca whispered, “are you all right?”

  “Yes, my dear,” the pilot said sadly. Cool black tracks streaked her face, where tears had fallen and not yet quite dried. “There aren’t many of us left, the first pilots. I’ve survived losing friends before. Never quite as close a friend as Miikala, though.”

  “I’m very sorry. That this happened.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ramona-Teresa…”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you turn the ships around again? Just for a few minutes? Please?”

  “If you wish.” The pilot’s short, square hands moved on the controls. The galaxies slid away.

  Orca sat crosslegged on the deck in front of the port and let the edge engulf her and slice through her.

  Someone spoke. Orca did not hear the words; she did not reply.

  Ramona crouched next to her and put one hand on her shoulder.

  “Orca —” she said again. The reflection of her face overlaid the edge. “Orca, what do you see in it?”

  “I… I don’t know.” Using true speech underwater, she might be able to describe it. She said a few phrases in middle speech.

  “Are you singing?” Ramona asked.

  “No,” Orca said. “I was trying to explain. But I don’t have any words you can understand.”

  Ramona’s reflection showed outrage, then she began to laugh.

  “I deserve that,” the pilot said. “Oh, I do deserve that, I and all the pilots.”

  Radu came in. Though his steps were silent, the warmth of his body reflected from the viewport and outlined him in a faint glow that brightened and dimmed with his pulse. His image combined and melded with Orca’s. She met his gaze in the reflection. As quiet as his image, he crossed the floor and sat beside her, and both of them looked out, out at the edge.

  o0o

  When Ramona’s signal came through the linked control panel, Laenea could have turned on the intercom and asked the older pilot not to change their orientation; she could even have counteracted the thrust. Instead, she ordered all the lights out and watched the edge come into view again. The viewport disappeared against black, and Laenea stared into a mystery so close she might reach out and touch it. It frightened her in a way she had never before been frightened. She had been scared before her first transit voyage, when she was still a crew member, as well as before the operation that made her a pilot and during the approach to this, her first training flight. Scared, yet excited and eager as well. This fear was of a much more intense unknown.

  But it was a familiar factor that immediately threatened them. The ships were traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light. The time distortion of transit aside, here in normal space (or was the edge normal space anymore?) they would experience relativistic effects. A minute here was some longer time back on earth. Laenea set the computer to figuring out the factor, then went looking for Ra
du.

  She found him sitting next to Orca, both of them gazing fascinated at the edge.

  “Radu —”

  She thought he had not heard her, but he finally looked over his shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you still tell when it is, back on earth?”

  “Of course.” He paused a moment. “Oh,” he said. “I see. You’re right. We probably shouldn’t stay here too much longer.”

  “How long have we been gone?”

  “You’d been gone nearly three weeks when we left, and since then it’s been, earth time, about eight days.”

  Laenea nodded. As long as they could measure their presence here in hours, their world would not outdistance them in time. But if they stayed too long, the effect of time dilation would be to transport them years into the future, when they would be not merely lost, but forgotten.

  “Ramona, we really had better go home,” Laenea said.

  Ramona nodded. “I suppose we had. Orca, is our ship ready?”

  Radu had to nudge her gently before she responded.

  “Yeah,” she said absently. “The repairs are done.”

  “Good. We’ll start home as soon as you’re asleep.”

  Startled out of her reverie, Orca jumped up and grabbed Laenea’s arm.

  “We’re going home? We came all this way just to turn around and go back?”

  “I came all this way by mistake — and you came all this way to find me.” Laenea drew away.

  Scowling, Orca kept her grip.

  “I’m sorry,” Laenea said. “I didn’t mean to be flippant. Orca, would you please let me go?”

  Orca complied without apology.

  “We aren’t prepared for exploration or research,” Laenea said. “We need to go back and set up a proper expedition. Besides, no one on board either ship contracted to be away from home for a couple of years. That’ll be the elapsed time on earth for even a short research trip.”

  “But —”

  “I’m sorry,” Laenea said again. “We have to go home.”

  Orca strode from the control room.

  Radu helped prepare his ship for transit, shunting the computers to transit mode. When they were ready, he went to the box room to help Orca go to sleep.