Superluminal

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  J.D. gazed out at space, at Earth, where the oceans dominated. A weather system had just passed over the Pacific northwest, leaving the area clearly visible.

  o0o

  The clicks and squeals and stutters of the orcas echoed across the inlet. The cold, clear water moved with a gentle, irresistible power, rolling fist-sized stones one against the other on the rocky shore, creating a rumble of counterpoint to the calling of the whales.

  J.D. swam. The artificial lung, nestled against her back, absorbed oxygen from the sea and transferred it to her mask.

  Kelp waved below. A bright orange nudibranch swam past, propelled by its frilly mantle. At the limit of J.D.’s vision, a salmon flashed silver-blue in the filtered light.

  She shivered. Her metabolic enhancer could produce only so much heat. She could have worn a wet suit, but it limited her contact with the sea.

  Soon she would have to swim away from the mouth of the inlet and return to shore. She stroked upward and broke the surface of the clear green water. Before her, the inlet opened out into a part of Puget Sound where no one could go without an invitation. Apparently the divers would not invite J.D. into the wilderness today.

  The orcas remained out of sight around the headland. She could imagine them playing, oblivious to the cold, their sleek black and white bodies cutting the swells. By morning they would be gone. They could swim a hundred kilometers between one dawn and the next. Orcas never stayed in one place for long.

  The sun on her face made the water feel even colder. J.D. turned and swam toward shore. Her cabin stood back among the Douglas firs that grew to the edge of the stony beach.

  Just offshore, she stopped at the anchored deck. She teased the artificial lung from her back and tethered it beneath the planks, where it would feed and breathe and rest and pump sea water through itself until she needed it again. She dove from the deck and swam easily home. Without the lung, she no longer felt a part of the sea.

  Barefoot, she picked her way among the beach stones. It was getting on toward evening. In the shade of the trees it was cool, and inside her cabin it was chilly. She plunged into the shower. The sun-warmed water splashed over her. After a few minutes she stopped shivering.

  Toweling her short straight hair, she turned the heat on under the kettle for a warm drink.

  “J.D.?”

  She started and wrapped the towel around her.

  “Zev, you’re so quiet. You scared me.”

  “I never meant to.” The diver stood in the doorway. Fine white-gold hair clothed his mahogany body in a translucent sheen. He looked awkward, seeking her out on land. She felt awkward, talking to him when she did not have any clothes on. That was strange, because she swam naked with him and his family, divers and orcas alike.

  “Sit down, excuse me a minute.” She turned her back and took a last swipe with the towel beneath her heavy breasts, then pulled on a shirt and a pair of baggy black pants.

  “I thought to find you in the sea,” Zev said.

  J.D. deliberately finished tying the drawstring. “I hoped to find you there. But I can’t stay in the water forever.”

  “We were talking,” he said. He lowered his gaze and glanced at her sideways, with an expression both mischievous and shy. “We sometimes talk for a long time.”

  “I’ve noticed that.” On the solar stove, the kettle steamed. Being in a wilderness area, the cabin had to be rustic. It contained no electronics beyond her web link. Nothing operated by voice-activation. Now that she knew how everything worked, it amused her to remember how long it took her to figure out all the mechanical switches. But it had not been very funny at the time.

  “Do you want a hot drink? I’m cold, and my fingers and toes are shriveled up like prunes.”

  Zev looked at his own hands, turning them over, spreading his fingers, stretching out the translucent swimming webs.

  “My fingers never do that,” he said. “Why not?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” J.D. said. “Physiology isn’t one of my specialties. Don’t you know?”

  “We are different,” he said.

  “That’s for sure.” The kettle hissed. “What did you decide? Do you want some tea, or maybe some cocoa?”

  “Some ice cream?” he said.

  J.D. laughed. “Sure.”

  He perched on the window seat, his knees pulled up, his feet apart, completely unconscious of his nakedness. When she first met him she wondered about his gender, for he had no external genitals. His people had engineered their basically human bodies into a more streamlined form: male genitals drawn inside, female breasts small and flat. Both genders possessed a layer of subcutaneous fat that burned away during any long underwater exertion, leaving the individual ethereal and with an appetite like a shark. Zev always amazed her with how much he could eat. She made herself some tea, gave him a dish of ice cream, and sat on the rag rug in a patch of sunlight. She still felt cold. She sipped her tea, glad of its sweet spicy warmth.

  “What was your family talking about?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “You, of course. That was why we did not invite you out today.”

  “I don’t see that it would have made much difference,” she said, “since I can’t understand your language yet.”

  “You will never begin to understand true speech, as you are.” He spoke quite matter-of-factly. “I will never understand it completely, either. But the next generation will.”

  If there is one, J.D. thought, but she kept her silence. She found the idea intolerable, that the divers might be permitted — or encouraged — to die out. It was all too possible, if the new administration acted on its prejudice against genetic engineering.

  “Besides,” Zev said, “it is rude to talk about someone in front of them when they cannot understand. Is that right?”

  “That’s right. Some people would say it’s rude to talk about someone behind her back, though, too.”

  “Oh. We did not know. We did not mean to be rude.” He hesitated. “J.D.?”

  “Yes?”

  “When is it polite to talk about someone?”

  “Good question,” she said. “Anytime they don’t know it, I guess.”

  “That is strange.”

  “Yes, it is,” J.D. said. “But never mind. Everybody does it, anyway. What did you say about me? Or can you tell me?”

  “No one said I should not. But perhaps you would rather have a surprise.”

  “I’d rather know.”

  “It is all right, then.” He put down the empty ice cream bowl. “We played and talked. Some said you were strange, swimming masked against the sea.”

  I might as well have stayed in the city, J.D. thought. The divers aren’t the only people who think I’m strange.

  “But I said you felt the sea as well as any diver, and would feel it more deeply when you could dispense with your machines.”

  Zev moved his hands like waves. Underwater the divers communicated by sound, and by touch when they were close enough. On land they retained the very human quality of adding to their speech with gestures.

  “We are aware that we know things you would like to understand. And we all agreed that you know a large number of things about which we have fallen into ignorance.”

  “Thank you for the compliment,” J.D. said.

  “My family thinks it is too bad that you are still entirely human. Many of us wonder if you have considered changing your nature.”

  J.D. clenched her hands around the mug of tea, oblivious to its heat.

  “J.D.?” Zev said. “I have surprised you. I did not mean to. Are you angry?”

  “Not angry,” she said. “Stunned. Zev... all I ever hoped for was that you’d invite me to stay in the open water — that you’d give me permission to bring my boat so I wouldn’t have to come back to the cabin every evening. What you’ve asked me is more than I dreamed. Is it possible?”

  “Of course,” he said. “You have visited our lab. We know what to do. We were neve
r born from human and orca, as some say. Nor did people throw little children into the ocean and say, ‘Swim, grow fins and extra lungs!’ We chose our creation, like all changelings.”

  “I know where divers came from — but no one’s gone from human to diver in a generation,” J.D. said. “Where are you going to get the biotechs?”

  “My family has resources.”

  J.D. blew on her tea and sipped from the cooling surface, taking time to think.

  What Zev offered her was attractive. It was also illegal. Even before becoming U.S. president last fall, Senator Distler had repeatedly sponsored a bill to force the divers to change back into ordinary humans. J.D. feared that now, as president, he might be able to force the bill through Congress. The divers had few vocal supporters, and they employed no lobbyists. It would be terrible public relations for the government if it rounded them up and forced them to undergo reversion against their will. That might be the divers’ only protection. After all, any individual could decide to revert at any time. The divers chose to remain as they were.

  As far as Distler and his supporters were concerned, preventing genetic diseases was one thing, changing the human species something quite different. The enthusiasm for human engineering had peaked and faded rapidly, leaving a sizable group of divers and a few other changelings. Only the divers had increased their numbers.

  “How will you decide?” Zev asked.

  “I don’t know,” J.D. said slowly. “I feel like saying yes without even thinking about it. But I should think about it.”

  “But how will you decide? With divers, the whole family plays and talks. Then we decide. Will you go to your family and talk with them? Will you play? You should play more, J.D.”

  She laughed, though Zev’s was a perfectly serious comment.

  “My family — ” She started to describe her family, half-siblings, half-parents, step-siblings, step-parents, dispersed and recombined. It was an unusual family even in these modern times.

  “My family never swims together,” she said, and left it at that. “This is a decision I’ll have to make by myself. May I have some time?”

  “My mother will talk to you tomorrow,” Zev said. “That will be the real invitation. But I think... you will have to decide quickly.”

  That was the last thing she had expected Zev to say. She had never known the divers to make an important decision in haste.

  “Why?”

  “I cannot tell you,” Zev said. He scooped up the melted ice cream on the bottom of the bowl with his finger and licked the chocolate from his knuckle and from the swimming web. He stood up. “Thank you for the ice cream.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He crossed to her and hugged her, holding her close. He was shorter than she. He laid his head on her shoulder, and the curls of his pale hair tickled her skin just below the hollow of her throat. J.D. put her arms around Zev, giving him a big-sisterly pat on the shoulder. On land the heat of his body was even more noticeable than in the water.

  He sighed deeply and stroked her breast. Startled, she put her hand on his, moved his fingers, and drew away.

  “What is wrong?”

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “But why? We touch each other when we’re swimming.”

  “It’s different on land, Zev. In the sea it’s just playing. On land, touching is more serious.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You see? We need you, to tell us these things that we have forgotten, so we will not forget everything about living on land.”

  His semi-retractile claws clicked on the linoleum, then his feet scrunched in the gravel of the beach. He moved with a languorous grace, as if he were already in the water. He waded through the gentle surf. The water rose around his legs. When it reached his hips he breast-stroked forward and vanished. The waves obliterated the ripple he left behind.

  Each wave reached a handsbreadth higher on the beach. J.D. watched the tide come in. Her tea grew cold.

  The invitation gave her more than one decision to make. Accepting it would completely change her life. She would be able to resurrect her career, though she would have to restrict its focus to a single blended society. The story of the integration of the divers with the orcas deserved to be told. If she accepted, she would be in a position to tell it.

  I should have accepted on the spot, J.D. thought.

  She could not come up with a single good reason to refuse — aside, of course, from the fact that she could be put in jail for becoming a changeling. This frightened her more than she cared to admit. She had been raised to obey authority, not defy it.

  This is the best chance you’re ever going to have to practice your profession, she told herself. If your application to Starfarer hadn’t been rejected, things might be different. But you were turned down. And, anyway, why should human contact with aliens off the Earth be more important than human contact with the beings that live on the same world, and still are alien to us?

  The change in her life would include her form. She would become not only a chronicler of the divers, but a diver herself. Somewhere, somehow, the divers would obtain the sensitizing virus, and the changing viruses; they would inoculate her with the one, then with the others. As the changing viruses spread through her body and integrated themselves into her genes, she would begin to change.

  She imagined her lungs enlarging, altering, the tissue of one lobe of each transmuting into a substance like the artificial lung. In that respect the divers differed from other marine mammals: they could breathe underwater, absorbing oxygen directly from the sea.

  She would dispense with the metabolic enhancer, because her body would gain the ability to accelerate into a more efficient state. Spreading her strong square hands, she imagined swimming webs between her fingers. She imagined her light complexion darkening to protect her from exposure to the sun, and wondered if her brown hair would pale to gold or red.

  She curled her toes to feel phantom claws extending, scratching the floor. Her breasts were heavier and her hips wider than any diver’s, and her imagination failed when she tried to think of her body changing to resemble their sleek shape. She wondered if her breasts would shrink and flatten, if her hips would narrow, if the changing virus could alter even a person’s bone structure.

  The idea of the change both frightened and intrigued her.

  She wondered what her family would say. They would not object. Her dad might make one of his offhand remarks, so dry that J.D. often found herself laughing before she realized what was funny, so offbeat she could not imagine what it would be.

  The shadows of the Douglas firs lengthened across the beach and pierced the water with their tips. The breeze freshened. J.D. felt cold again, as if she had never really been warm.

  She had to give herself time before deciding. So many factors came into the mix. The opportunity of joining a group of beings that she loved, of telling their story, had to be balanced against the possibility — indeed the probability — that academic colleagues would no longer take seriously the work of a researcher who had, in the old-fashioned phrase, gone native.

  And she had to face the legal question of making the change.

  Perhaps a few years ago it would not have mattered. It was possible that even now, no one would notice. But if they did, the current fashion of despising science and technology would cause her a great deal of trouble. And that did worry her.

  So did Zev’s uncharacteristic reluctance to tell her why she would have to make her choice so quickly.

  The sun set. Darkness crept into the cabin.

  Needing the familiarity of simple actions, J.D. put her teacup in the sink, puttered around straightening up the cabin, and, for the first time all day, asked her web link for mail and messages and the day’s report.

  It reported.

  Victoria’s invitation to join the alien contact team suddenly made her life even more complicated.

  o0o

  Victoria watched J.D. as she gazed back at Earth.
She was glad the contact specialist had agreed to join the expedition on such short notice, after Nakamura quit.

  It must have been hard on her, Victoria thought, to be turned down and then invited again. It takes a lot of guts to put aside hurt feelings.

  Nevertheless, she wished she knew all the reasons J.D. had changed her mind about staying with the divers. Victoria felt certain that she did not yet have the whole story.

  “J.D.?”

  J.D. continued to stare out the window for a moment. When she turned to Victoria, her expression was wistful, lonely.

  “Time to board the transport.”

  In low Earth orbit, the spaceplane docked with the EarthSpace transport, an ungainly-looking but efficient craft, one of the trucks that ferried cargo and passengers from low Earth orbit to the O’Neill colonies and the labs, to lunar orbit, and to Starfarer.

  As Victoria helped J.D. negotiate the zero-g path from the plane to the transport, she glanced over the passengers sharing the journey. The space-plane, which should have been full with a waiting list, was half empty. These days, too few people traveled out to Starfarer. Far too many traveled away, recalled by their governments, or, like Nakamura, giving up in despair.

  While the plane resembled a regular jetliner, with well-maintained upholstery and paint, the transport looked more like a tramp freighter. Its workings hung out in plain sight, exposed, growing shabby with age and use.

  “Quite a difference,” J.D. said, glancing around. She held the net bags stuffed with her and Victoria’s personal allowances. Her possessions were drab next to the bright colors and textures that showed through the mesh of Victoria’s bag.

  “There’s one new transport,” Victoria said. Towing J.D. by one hand, she pushed off down a corridor. “They always schedule it so it’s the one that picks up the VIPs on their junkets. I never have figured that out. If we let them see the old equipment, we might get enough money to keep it properly maintained.”

  “Can I try this myself?” J.D. said.

  “Sure.” Victoria took the two mesh bags. “Remember that even though you haven’t got any weight, you still have mass and momentum.”