She was gone.
“Orca?”
He hurried through the small ship, swung down into the engine room, searched for and failed to find her. He opened the intercom.
“Laenea, is Orca on board your ship?”
“I don’t think so. Isn’t she sleeping yet? I’m ready to start for a transit point.”
“I can’t find her.”
Laenea’s voice switched channels, following him automatically as he went from room to room.
“Shall I come help you look?”
Radu stopped in front of the airlock. One of the suit packs was missing.
“Laenea!”
“Yes?”
“Don’t put any delta vee on the ship!” He grabbed a second pack and fastened the collar around his neck and shoulders.
“Why not? What’s wrong?”
“Just don’t. Don’t do anything.” He was afraid to take the time to explain. He turned on the suit. The fine support of an energy field enclosed him. Everything he looked at sparkled slightly around its edges. He hurried into the airlock and started it cycling.
When the exterior hatch slid aside, Radu found Orca immediately. Her suit glowed faintly blue against the formidable blackness. Lacking even a tether, she floated in space as she might float in the sea. Radu touched the lifeline plate, and a tenuous extension formed from the ship to his suit.
He pushed off toward her, toggling his radio on.
Orca was singing.
The sound made him shiver. It spoke of the whole universe behind him, and of something unknown, perhaps unknowable, before him.
Orca drifted farther and farther away. By the time Radu reached her, his lifeline had stretched far beyond its limits of safety, into a filmy, silky wisp, a filament of blue smoke connecting him to the ship. The hypnotic notes of Orca’s singing drew him on.
“Orca!”
The melody never faltered. Radu reached for her. His hand passed through the skin of her suit, the two fields merged, and he grasped her arm directly.
“Orca!”
Her haunted song touched him like a lover. He turned off his radio, but the sound passed directly between them and he could not block it out. He pulled Orca around to face him. She had a strange, lost, searching look in her eyes that frightened him, because he had only seen that look before in the eyes of people who knew they were going to die. She fell silent.
Radu reached behind him and stroked the lifeline to make it contract, willing it not to dissolve from the stress and abandon them. He drew Orca closer, every moment expecting her to break loose, flee beyond his reach, and lose herself before he could call for help, as he should have done in the first place. But she remained quiescent. He embraced her and their suit fields melded together into a single entity. Orca’s heart beat fast and hard.
Radu risked a glance toward the ship and saw to his relief that the lifeline was contracting and thickening slowly but steadily, pulling them back to safety.
When they had cycled back through the airlock, Radu turned off the suits.
“What do you think you were doing out there? Good gods —!” He pulled off his suit collar and threw it into its container.
“I need to get closer to it,” she said. “I need to see it more clearly —”
“There isn’t any ‘it’ to get close to!”
“You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything. All my senses are different from yours —”
“This is absurd. Come away.”
He removed her suit collar, as gently as he had ever dressed a child in the nursery where he had worked on Twilight.
“It’ll be better to come back later. We need more than just the x-team computer to study what’s out here, we need the ship and the specialists, too.”
“I know we do,” Orca said bitterly. “But what chance do you think I’ve got to come back?”
“Oh…” Radu said. “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Why should you? They’ll let you go — they’ll probably make you go even if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t think —”
“Half the instruments they send will be for studying the edge, and the other half will be for studying you!”
“But you’re here — you volunteered —”
She made a rude and derisive noise. “Who wouldn’t volunteer? Ninety percent of the crew is on the exploratory mission waiting list! I’ve got no seniority and none of the right credentials!”
“Orca…” Radu stopped. She was, all too probably, quite right. He wished he could laugh off what she said. But she was right.
She cursed again and strode away. Radu waited, giving her time to regain her composure, then followed her to the box room. Her sleep chamber stood ready.
“You must go to sleep, Orca, we have to go home.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep, I want to stay awake —” She spun on him and grabbed his wrist, clenching her fingers around the sore, bruised slash.
Radu winced.
“Nothing would happen to me in transit, it’s all mistakes, it’s all lies!” Orca glared at her sleep chamber.
Lying down and letting his consciousness dissolve into the dream-filled anesthetic darkness would have been a comfort for Radu.
“If I don’t get in there,” Orca said, “who’s to say I won’t survive?”
Radu shook his head, remembering Marc. “The risks are real, Orca. I don’t know why I’m immune to them, but they’re real. Maybe they’ll catch up to me.”
“What do you see, Radu?” Orca asked softly. “What’s in transit?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t describe it. I’m sorry, the pilots are right, there aren’t any words. I can’t even remember what it looked like, what it felt like, because there aren’t any words for it and I haven’t got any way to set it in my mind.”
Orca pushed off her right shoe with the toe of her left, the left shoe with her bare right toes. She clenched her hands and flexed her feet. Her extended claws scraped the deck.
“There are words for it,” she said. “But not your words.”
She hugged him tightly, desperately. He clasped her to him, feeling the long strong muscles of her back move beneath the rough texture of her vest. He touched her fine hair. She withdrew from their embrace, squeezed his hand, and faced her sleep chamber as if it were an enemy.
He stayed near, even after the instruments showed she was asleep. He waited until he was sure for himself that she was under the anesthetic. He watched her sleep, envying her and pitying her both at the same time.
He joined Laenea in her ship.
“Orca’s asleep.”
“Good.” She waited expectantly.
“What’s the matter?” Radu said.
“You tell me — you’re the one who didn’t want the ship to accelerate yet.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Orca… Orca needed another few minutes to look around.” He said nothing of the diver’s odd behavior, for he suspected that if it became known to the administrators, her future in the crew might be seriously compromised.
Laenea raised one eyebrow, then shrugged and turned on the intercom. “Ramona, Vasili, I’m going to take us home.”
The other pilots’ seniority meant nothing anymore. Laenea’s perceptions would create another level to the hierarchy. As for Radu’s ability — whatever it was — he had no idea what it would do.
Radu watched from the second pilot’s place, copilot of an unplanned exploration, as the two linked ships dove down into transit. He braced himself for the change.
This time he made the transition calmly. He embraced the perceptions; he let them flow into him, and flowed around them himself. The sensation of being able to encompass and comprehend the whole universe swept him up.
His sight blurred slightly, but he could keep track of what was here and now, what was the past, what the future. Curiously, and with some trepidation, he looked at Laenea.
Her image exploded into such a mult
iplicity of visions that Radu shoved himself back in his chair, astonished and confused.
He closed his eyes and sorted himself back into reality, seeking an explanation of what had happened. He could not perceive Laenea the way he had Miikala. Miikala’s possibilities were ended, Laenea’s just begun. They increased every moment, with every decision, every subatomic interaction. He could see an unambiguous future for a living creature only from the moment of its death.
In the ordinary fashion, without trying to track her, he watched Laenea. The artificial gravity obscured changes in velocity whether the ship was in normal space or in transit.
“Tell me what you’re doing,” Radu said.
“I took us a little way through seventh, you can’t go very far in it or you end up at the other end of the universe — or back where you started.” She disappeared behind her oxygen mask for a moment. “As soon as we get back to where Miikala died, we’ll retrace my training flight. I know all the coordinates; it’d be a lot shorter distance if we cut across, but I haven’t enough experience and Vasili would rather sulk than pilot.”
“His pride’s hurt,” Radu said. “He’s used to being the best. Then you come along, and do something he can’t… Even worse, I come along, a crew member —”
“Stop shrugging off what you’ve done, Radu! Vaska knows it’s extraordinary, and I certainly know it, because you gave me back my life.”
“How could I not?” Radu said, smiling. “I owed you mine. Haven’t I told you people from Twilight always pay their debts?”
She grinned back at him, reached out automatically for his hand, but stopped before she touched him. She turned the movement into a shrug of inevitability.
“Is it different out there now for you?”
“No,” he said, glad of the change of subject. “No, I felt — or saw, I don’t know how to describe it, it was a sensation that existed inside my mind, but something, while you piloted us through seventh. But now it’s just the same as before, there’s nothing out there.” He looked at the viewport, still somehow expecting it to change.
When he glanced back at Laenea, he found her staring at him intently.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, startled by her frown.
She relaxed her concentration, shrugged, and laughed.
“I was performing an experiment,” she said, “but I disproved my hypothesis.”
“What was it?”
“That you found me by hearing my thoughts.”
“I don’t believe there’s such a thing as telepathy.”
“It was worth a try, but I thought at you as hard as I could, and nothing happened, you didn’t hear anything, or feel it, or whatever you did.”
“No,” he said. What I did was find you again, Radu thought. I found you once, and lost you through my own failure. If I’d failed you a second time I thought it would have meant your life.
He felt embarrassed to say that out loud. Instead, he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You weren’t really lost. You would have found your way home.”
“Would I? The ship was out of control the whole time I tried to help Miikala, and when it stopped, I didn’t know where I was. Say it took me a year to find a way back — you can figure out better than I can how long that would have been on earth.”
The information came unbidden into Radu’s mind. He pushed it away. He would have been long dead when Laenea returned, far in the future and forgotten. The prospect of his own death did not trouble him — he had been on borrowed time ever since he survived the plague — but the idea of living out his life believing Laenea was dead, unable to help her while she struggled to survive, sent a shiver through him.
“Are you all right?” Laenea said.
“Yes. But I’ve changed…
“I know,” she said. “So have I.”
She put her hand on his, and slid her fingers up to his wrist. He felt his pulse against the pressure, a strong, steady beat. The beat suddenly clenched into a wave of darkness. Radu gasped.
Laenea jerked her hand back with a sharp exclamation of surprise. Radu’s vision cleared. Laenea rubbed her hand as if it had received an electric shock. She met his gaze, with regret.
“Neither of us has changed enough, have we?” Radu said. If anything, he was less compatible with pilots, she less compatible with normal human beings, than they had been before.
Laenea shook her head. “We’ve changed too much,” she said. “And in all the wrong ways.”
Radu looked down at his hands. Beneath the dirty bandage on his wrist, the cut itched. He rubbed it.
“I love you,” he said suddenly. “None of this makes any difference, not that you’re a pilot and I can’t be, not that we can’t be together. I still love you.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
o0o
The transit ship shimmered into Einsteinian space. Laenea scanned for the beacon, found it, locked in and analyzed it, and felt pleased by her accuracy. She was only a few hours from Earthstation. She was, in fact, only just outside the limit at which it was felt to be safe to surface from a transit dive. She plotted a course toward the station. The two docked ships slowly spun, then gently accelerated.
Normal space seemed flat and dull to her. She could see the fourth spatial dimension of ordinary objects, and force one more perspective upon them, but sixth was lost, and seventh almost unimaginable. Seventh was what thrilled her. Laenea very nearly turned the ship around and fled back into transit.
Instead, she signaled Earthstation. Suspecting a hoax, the controller who answered reacted first with disbelief, then, when he accepted what she said, with astonishment. He disappeared from the channel; when he returned, the background noise had changed to that of shocked and excited conversations.
Despite the uniqueness of the ship’s return, the ordinary work remained. Laenea roused the computers, and Radu helped Orca out of transit sleep. But Laenea’s crew member woke in a state of confusion and exhaustion bordering on shock. They put him to bed, undrugged, for some real sleep.
The news of a lost ship’s return was spreading rapidly. Laenea had the easy task of telling her crew member’s family that he was alive, and would be well.
Ramona took the job of contacting Miikala’s family. By the time she got through to them she had to destroy their raised hopes. Nothing she could say could ease their grief; perhaps only another pilot could understand the factors that tempered it.
Two hours later Laenea docked the ships with Earthstation and logged them in. Only after she had finished did she remember that Ramona had the right and the responsibility to command the ships, and, after her, Vasili. Vasili remained in his cabin, and Ramona had hardly spoken since contacting Miikala’s family. Now, in a silent depression, Ramona deferred to Laenea without comment or objection.
Laenea started to apologize, but the older pilot nodded.
“Fine,” she said. Her voice held resignation. “Never mind, it was a good return.”
Laenea felt uncomfortable, and a little wild.
“But what now?” When she was still in the crew she had always had several hours’ work to finish after docking. As a pilot, she was at the end of her duties.
“The administrators will have plans for you,” Ramona said. “But so do the pilots.”
A medical team was already waiting when Laenea opened the hatch. They took Laenea’s crew member off to the clinic, and carried away Miikala’s shrouded body. Ramona watched them go. Laenea moved nearer to the older pilot, wondering if Ramona might break down again. Instead, she blinked quickly, raised her head, straightened up, and looked exactly her old self. Her grief concealed, she led Laenea and the others into Earthstation.
The shuttle bay, usually active and busy, was so quiet and empty that the footsteps approaching them echoed. Dr. van de Graaf, the surgeon who had performed the operation on Laenea to make her a pilot, stopped in front of Ramona and regarded her coolly. She wore a severely tailored business suit and looked, if pos
sible, even more self-possessed than before.
“Welcome back, pilots,” she said.
“Hello, Kristen,” Ramona said. “Radu, Orca, this is Dr. van de Graaf, of the transit board. Kristen, I believe you are acquainted with Vasili and Laenea.”
“Yes,” she said. “Laenea and I have had some interesting discussions about the decisions of administrators.”
Laenea said nothing. She felt annoyed not to have been told that the surgeon was also a transit administrator. Van de Graaf smiled slightly, assuming, no doubt, that Laenea regretted her remarks about the conservatism of the transit authority. Quite the contrary, had Laenea known the doctor held a position of power, she would have pressed the case more strongly.
“Please come with me.” Somehow van de Graaf made the civility sound sincere, rather than a concession to good manners. “We have a lot to talk about.”
Laenea glanced at Ramona, who folded her arms and shook her head. “Indeed we do,” she said. “You may speak with Laenea after we do, Kri.”
“No, Ramona, not this time. The event is unique.”
Ramona chuckled. “It’s a shame that there’s no superlative for ‘unique.’ Believe me, Kri, for once the interests of the pilots and the interests of the administrators coincide. It’s more important than ever for the debriefing to proceed as usual. What happened is exactly what the debriefing is intended to explore.”
A moment of disbelief showed on van de Graaf’s face before her control and serenity returned. Much more was going on between her and Ramona than Laenea observed, and she felt as if her fate were being decided in the dense silence between the administrator and the pilot.
Van de Graaf nodded abruptly. “All right.”
“Don’t I have anything to say about any of this?” Laenea said irritably.
“No, my dear,” Ramona said easily. “Not right now.”
Chapter 12
Laenea followed Ramona to a small cubicle supplied with voice recorder, writing and drawing terminal, even paper, pens, pencils, and a set of paints.
“What you’re to do is record your impressions and your experience of transit in whatever way is most comfortable for you,” Ramona said. She spoke quite formally. “If you prefer some other medium, you need only ask, and I will have the materials brought to you. Afterwards, we can talk about it, and you’ll be free to look at the records all the rest of us have made. Do you have any questions?”
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