“She also said you were her friend. That gives us the privilege of helping you, if we can.”
Wolf was in her mid-forties, perhaps, a handsome woman, taller than Orca but with similar coloring: dark skin and very pale hair. The handle of a knife strapped to her leg projected through the split side seam of her cutoffs, in easy reach.
“You’d better hear what happened, first,” Radu said.
He told her everything.
“Now I see why my daughter asked if I were feeling revolutionary,” Wolf said when Radu had finished.
“Will it come to that?” Radu asked. “Would they attack you, to make me go back?” He felt a deep distress at the possibility of involving the divers in warfare.
“If they do, they’ll use very diplomatic violence. We keep our fights on a high plane these days.” She smiled; the resemblance between her and her daughter became that much more striking. “Now let me ask you something. Do you truly believe your employers would infect people with this disease, if you let them recreate it?”
“I don’t want to believe it,” Radu said. “But all their questioning led in that direction. And they wouldn’t tell me what they meant to do. I was afraid that if I waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to stop them if that was what they planned.”
Wolf nibbled on her fingernail, deep in thought, and remained silent most of the rest of the trip.
o0o
While waiting all day to catch a shuttle, Laenea had plenty of time to think. The administration had no real reason to schedule this exploratory trip so soon, and the haste with which it had been arranged insured that it would be poorly organized and result in little useful information. Laenea was anxious to return to transit, but she did not let the administrators use her eagerness or her joy to erase her suspicions.
Radu was still missing; Orca had vanished into the sea. Even Marc remained unavailable. He had set his analogue to answering his phone, and the analogue had years of experience at courteously refusing to reply to questions. Laenea was the only link to Radu the administrators had left, and she had no doubt that they wanted him back. It seemed likely to her that they hoped Radu would perceive that she had entered seventh again, fear that she was once more in danger, and give himself away.
But she let her employers think she believed what they told her about exploration and knowledge. She had two reasons. First, she believed she had at least as good a chance of warning Radu as of betraying him.
Second — and perhaps Vasili Nikolaievich was right; perhaps she was brutally selfish — Laenea could not bear to be out of transit any longer.
o0o
As Wolf had said it would, the blimp reached Harmony by midnight. Radu guided the airship to a meadow on the crest of the island. Several divers grabbed its trailing lines and drew it to the mast; others came running with bags of sand to heave into the ballast compartments. Soon the blimp rolled in a gentle, narrow arc, swinging back and forth in erratic wind currents. Wolf and Radu climbed down.
To his surprise, Orca waited for him on the ground.
“Welcome to Harmony,” she said to Radu. “Hi, loup-chérie,” she said to her mother, giving her a quick embrace. She hugged Radu tightly. Instead of the bright, metal-scaled clothing she wore on shipboard, she had on a pair of faded blue cutoffs like everyone else. She still wore her red deck shoes.
“I’m very grateful to you,” Radu said.
“We haven’t done anything yet. You’d better wait and see if we can be of any help.”
Just being among people he felt he could trust, people who had no motive to deceive him or bend him to their will, was the greatest help he could wish for right now. Just being in a real place, a place not constructed, artificial, controlled, made him happy.
“How did you get here so fast?” Radu said. “Do you ride the killer whales?”
Orca laughed. “No. They hate it when you do that. Mom sent the seaplane for us.” She introduced her brother, who stood back shyly in the shadows. He resembled Orca closely, and he was naked; he did not even carry the knife belt most of the other divers wore next to their skin.
“I’m glad to see you survived the flight,” Wolf said smiling.
“As well as I ever do.”
“I liked it,” Mark said. “I’d like to learn to fly a plane. What’s flying a blimp like?”
“I’d be glad to show you, if we get a chance,” Radu said.
“Forgive me, mes petites,” Wolf said. “I’ll leave you. Radu, you’ll have to excuse us if we’re a bit distracted tonight.” She gripped his upper arm in a welcoming gesture and vanished into the darkness. Mark stayed with them a moment, then suddenly said, “I have some things to do, too. See you later,” and disappeared.
Orca watched him go. “Well, he isn’t very subtle yet, but he’s getting the idea.”
“Has anyone asked about me?” Radu said, preoccupied. “Do you think they can find out where I am?”
“They’ll probably figure it out eventually.” She took his hand. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”
“I wish I hadn’t had to involve you,” Radu said.
“No more apologies. They aren’t necessary. I offered you our help. I’m glad you trust me enough to take it.” She drew him along the dark path, down from the crest of the island toward its shore. “Stop worrying for a while.”
She took him through a grove of evergreen trees. The ground was soft beneath his feet, the rocky island soil cushioned by layers of fallen needles. Radu had been so long among machines and concentrations of people, the constant background noise of civilization, that the silence of Orca’s home struck him with wonder. It was a presence, not an absence. He stopped, so even his footsteps did not mar it. Orca stopped, too, and glanced back curiously.
Nothing Radu could think of to say to her expressed what he felt, so he remained silent. They continued on along the path.
Nestled against the slope, nearly concealed by trees, a low, shingled building faced the water. Orca opened the carved wooden door and led him inside, where she kicked off her shoes and set them on a shelf in the entryway. Radu followed suit.
“This is the longhouse,” Orca said. “The labs are down at the other end, sleeping rooms are this way.” She showed him to a room that was illuminated by moonlight streaming through the window. Tatami mats covered the floor, and a futon lay folded against one wall next to a low wooden table holding a brass lamp. The room was spare and peaceful. Radu felt immediately at home, as he had not, not anywhere, for years. He walked to the window and looked out. The hillside fell away sharply to the water; trees outlined without obscuring the wide channel between this island and the next. A white flash caught his gaze. A killer whale arced upward, then vanished beneath the water. Another followed, and a third. As Radu’s eyes became more accustomed to the darkness he could see more than the bright patches on the creatures’ sides. The bay and the channel beyond were full of whales and divers, playing and swimming, surfacing and disappearing again with barely a splash, barely a ripple.
In the channel, a creature bigger than anything Radu had ever seen, or ever imagined, glided in a slow and graceful curve across the surface of the water. He gasped.
The moonlight silvered Orca’s pale hair. Radu had not even noticed her move beside him, but now he was acutely aware of her presence.
“What was that?” Radu whispered.
“A great whale,” Orca said. “A blue. They’re open ocean beings, they never come into straits or bays. But a representative came, for our transition meeting.”
Radu watched, fascinated. The enormous creature spouted, then lay quiet on the surface of the water.
“There are only a few of them left,” Orca said. “It’s only been thirty years since they stopped being hunted —” She stopped, started again, and said with difficulty, “Since humans stopped killing them. It will take them a long time to recover, if they ever do.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Radu said.
“Being n
ear them, talking to them — it’s like being at the center of the universe,” Orca said. “It’s terrifying, but they can’t understand that. Fear is one of the few things they can’t understand. The blues aren’t afraid of my cousins, even though sometimes — not anymore, because of the truce, but in the past and maybe in the future — killer whales killed blues.”
Radu looked down at her. She was intent on the scene below.
“You need to be down there, don’t you?”
She replied, finally, after a long silence. “Yes,” she said. “I really do. I’m sorry. You must be exhausted. Why don’t you sleep for a while? I’ll be able to spend some time with you in the afternoon.”
“I don’t think I could sleep,” Radu said. “I’d rather — would it be impolite of me to sit on the shore and watch? I don’t want to intrude on your privacy… ”
She glanced up at him, her smile one of amusement and even glee, the somberness of a moment ago vanished.
“It wouldn’t be rude at all. You’re our guest, a member of my family, while you’re here. Radu — would you like to come swimming with me?”
He felt as if she had offered him a new world, one he had dreamed of but could never find.
“Yes!” he said, then ruefully, “But I tried that before, remember, and it didn’t work out very well.”
“You just weren’t properly prepared,” she said. “Come on.” She took him through the hall and down a long flight of steps, wood first, then stone, that led into the living rock of the island. At the bottom, a tunnel reached out to a wooden dock that crossed the tiny, rocky beach. A small chamber had been cut near the mouth of the tunnel. Inside it, Orca chose a garment from a hook on the wall. It was black, with a white stripe up each side and down each arm.
“It’s a wet suit,” Orca said. “Once in a while we get a visitor who’s a lander, and wants to swim. A field suit would protect you, but you wouldn’t really be in the water. The wet suit is better. Ever wear one before?”
“No.”
“It’ll keep you warm. You’ve probably never worn a scuba tank —?”
He shook his head.
“Okay. I’ll teach you to use the tank some other time. Tonight you can use a snorkel.”
She helped him out of his clothes and into the wet suit, then led him to the end of the dock. He entered the dark water hesitantly. After a quick shock of cold, the trapped water warmed against his skin and he felt perfectly comfortable.
“You won’t want to go very deep anyway, or move around too much, just yet,” Orca said. “But you can watch and listen.”
They swam out into the bay.
Listening was extraordinary. He could see very little, despite the clear water and the face mask that permitted him to open his eyes beneath the surface. But the sounds — ! He was surrounded by them, engulfed and inundated, penetrated: long, leisurely songs that formed a background to it all, trains of clicks and whistles that started below his hearing range, sailed up through it like a rocket, and passed far beyond, moans and sighs and laughter. At times he felt he was at the focus of a wave of sound, as if one of Orca’s cousins, or even one of the other, larger whales, were looking him over, sounding him out. Radu hung in the water, just beneath the surface, breathing through the snorkel and trying to make out the forms and shapes around him. Orca waited long enough to be certain he was comfortable, then swam to join the others. But now and again a diver passed Radu and touched him reassuringly, or waved; a few times one of the killer whales glided beneath him, and once one let its fluke curve up and stroke him from chest to toes. The touch was unbelievably gentle. Nothing in his life before, not his first trip into space, Twilight spinning slow and graceful above him, not Earthstation, not even the moment of transition into seventh, had affected him like this. He felt calm, and enchanted, and in the midst of a magic night.
For a long time nothing moved nearby, and the sounds receded. Radu moved his hands till he floated upright with his head above the surface. He barely needed to tread water, the wet suit was so buoyant. He pushed the mask to his forehead. The group of whales — several kinds of whales, now, besides the killers and the magnificent blue — had moved out through the mouth of the bay, to the channel. Radu slid his mask back down and set off after them.
The bottom dropped away sharply. Radu kept swimming. He was not at all afraid or even apprehensive. Soon he was as close to the group as he had been before, perhaps a little closer, and his good sense overcame his desire actually to go among the whales. No matter Orca’s welcome, he was only honorarily and temporarily a member of her family. He was a landbound guest, wrapped in black rubber, while the beings nearby frolicked naked in the freezing sea, and spoke to each other in song.
Very slowly — so slowly he felt not the slightest fear — a shape rose up beneath him. It was so big it lost its form in distance and darkness.
The blue whale rose till its great eye looked him right in the face. From a distance the blue whale had been awe inspiring. This close, its size was simpler: incomprehensible. Radu reached out, as slowly as the whale had approached him, hesitantly, in case his touch might be unwanted. The whale closed its eye, and opened it again, and did not move. Radu touched its skin. It was soft and smooth and warm. Even when he took his hand away, he could feel the warmth of the whale radiating through the water.
The great blue whale blinked at him again, embracing Radu in sound.
I can’t understand you, Radu thought. I wish I could, but I can’t. I can’t even speak to you in my own language, not around this rubber mouthpiece and through all this water.
The blue whale blinked a third time; the caress of music ceased. The whale moved very slowly forward, gliding past Radu, making no more noise than a feather in air. It curved downward, diving. The pressure of the water parting for it pushed Radu gently back. He lay motionless, entranced by the whale’s sheer presence.
A lifetime later the creature’s flukes slid by beneath him, and it vanished into depths of dark water.
Radu dove down after it and swam a few meters, fighting the buoyancy of the wet suit.
“Wait—”
Air bubbled up around his face and he got a mouthful of cold salt water. It served to bring him to his senses. He struck out for the surface, broke through, and gasped and coughed for air.
Now he knew how Orca had felt, confronting the edge; he understood why she had left the ship. He knew how Vasili and Laenea felt in transit. He knew what it was like to meet an alien.
The divers and the whales cavorted and played far off in the channel. Radu knew he could not join them. He turned and swam back into the bay, toward the lights of the divers’ house.
He was halfway there when Orca broke the surface nearby and swam beside him.
“She talked to you,” Orca said. Awe touched her voice.
“I guess she did,” Radu said. He stopped swimming and faced her. “But I couldn’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. You might not have understood her even if you could understand true speech. But the blues hardly ever speak to divers, Radu! They’ve never adopted any of us as their family.”
Some faint ambition and unformed wish faded away just as Radu became aware of its existence. He felt tired and lonely.
“Would it be rude for me to go ashore?” he asked.
“No, of course not. Come on. I’ll swim with you.”
Radu set out to cross the other half of the bay, swimming slowly. Orca sidestroked alongside him, graceful even at a pace that to her must have been like creeping, or floundering.
Radu climbed up the ladder and stood dripping on the dock. Orca helped him out of the wet suit and showed him how to rinse it in fresh water, to keep the salt from damaging it. Radu hardly noticed the chill of the air on his bare skin; it was almost as if he had learned the divers’ ability to stay warm in freezing water. He and Orca walked down the dock and into the cavern.
“Orca…”
“Hmm?”
“What di
d she say to me?”
“That’s awfully hard to explain, here on the surface.”
“Please,” he said desperately. “Please try.”
“She told you her name. Not just the sonic description, her whole name. That’s part of what’s hard to explain. Your sonic name is objective — anybody who’s met you knows what it is, and anybody who hears it will recognize you immediately. The rest of it… it’s a combination of your experiences and your feelings and your beliefs. Then she asked you your name —”
“And I couldn’t answer…”
“She understood. I’m sure she did. She knew you weren’t a diver. She wouldn’t be offended. They just aren’t, not ever. Then she welcomed you to the transition, and said you and she would speak together some other time.”
“Is that possible?”
“You’d have to learn middle speech, at least. True speech would be better.”
“They must be difficult languages.”
“Well, I grew up speaking them, so I don’t know how hard they are for adults. But I’ve been told they’re easy to begin to learn. They’re very flexible, though, and I don’t think anybody — any of the divers — knows true speech completely. Parts of it you can make up as you go along, and anyone who speaks it will understand what you’re saying.”
Radu raised one eyebrow, not exactly disbelieving Orca, but finding the description difficult to comprehend.
“I don’t think anything exists that you can’t describe in true speech,” Orca said.
“Not anything?”
Orca hung the wet suit up on its peg and tossed Radu his clothes.
“I guess I’d have to see transit to prove that, wouldn’t I?” Her voice was distant and thoughtful.
She accompanied him upstairs. He felt comfortable enough in her presence now that he did not feel the need to dress himself immediately.
The simplicity of the divers’ house welcomed Radu in a way that none of earth’s overdone luxury could match, in a way he had not experienced since before his family died. In his room again, he looked down on the channel where the whales and divers swam.
“What are they doing out there?” Radu said.
Superluminal Page 29
