Superluminal

Superluminal

Vonda N. McIntyre

Book View Café Edition
September 2009
ISBN: 978-1-61138-083-5
Copyright © 1983 Vonda N. McIntyre
www.bookviewcafe.com

For Carolyn

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

After the operation, Laenea Trevelyan lived through what
seemed an immense time of semiconsciousness, drugged so she would not feel the
pain, kept almost insensible while drugs sped her healing. Those who watched
her did not know she would have preferred consciousness and an end to her
uncertainty. So she slept, shallowly, drifting toward awareness, driven back,
existing in a world of nightmare. Her dulled mind suspected danger but could do
nothing to protect her. She had been forced too often to sleep through danger.
She would have preferred the pain.

Once Laenea almost woke: She glimpsed the sterile white
walls and ceiling, blurrily, slowly recognizing what she saw. The green glow of
monitoring screens flowed across her shoulder, over the scratchy sheets. Taped
down, needles scraped nerves in her arm. She became aware of sounds, and heard
the rhythmic thud of a beating heart.

She tried to cry out in anger and despair. Her left hand was
heavy, lethargic, insensitive to her commands, but she moved it. It crawled
like a spider to her right wrist and fumbled at the needles and tubes.

Air shushed from the room as the door opened. A gentle voice
and a gentle touch reproved her, increased the flow of sedative, and cruelly
returned her to sleep.

A tear slid back from the corner of her eye and trickled
into her hair as she reentered her nightmares, accompanied by the counterpoint
of a basic human rhythm, the beating of a heart, that she had hoped never to
hear again.

o0o

Pastel light was Laenea’s first assurance that she
would live. It gave her no comfort. Intensive care had been stark white.
Yellows and greens brightened this room. The sedative wore off and she knew she
would finally be allowed to wake. She did not fight the continuing drowsiness,
but depression prevented anticipation of the return of her senses. She wanted
only to hide within her own mind, ignoring her body, ignoring failure. She did
not even know what she would do in the future; perhaps she had none anymore.

Yet the world impinged on her as she grew bored with lying
still and sweaty and self-pitying. She had never been able to do simply
nothing
.
Stubbornly she kept her eyes closed, but the sounds vibrated through her body,
like shudders of cold and fear.

This was my chance, she thought, but I knew I might fail. It
could have been worse, or better: I might have died.

She slid her hand up her body, from her stomach to her ribs,
across the bandages and the tip of the new scar between her breasts, to her
throat. Her fingers rested at the corner of her jaw, just above the carotid
artery.

She could not feel her pulse.

Pushing herself up abruptly, Laenea ignored sharp twinges of
pain. The vibration of a heartbeat continued beneath her palms, but now she
could tell that it did not come from her own body.

The amplifier sat on the bedside table, sending out a steady
low-frequency pattern. Laenea felt laughter bubbling up. She knew it would hurt
and she did not care. She dragged the speaker off the table. Its cord ripped
from the wall as she flung it sidearm across the room. It smashed in the corner
with a satisfying clatter.

She pushed aside the sheets. She was stiff and sore. She
rolled out of bed because it hurt too much to sit up. She staggered and caught
herself. Fluid in her lungs coarsened her breathing. She coughed, caught her
breath, coughed again. Time was a mystery, measured only by weakness. She
thought the administrators fools, to force sleep into her, risk her to
pneumonia, and play recorded hearts, instead of letting her wake and move and
adjust to her new condition.

Barefoot, Laenea walked slowly across the cool tile to a
warm patch of sunshine. She gazed out the window. The day was variegated, gray
and golden. Clouds moved from the west across the mountains and the Sound while
sunlight still spilled over the city. The shadows moved along the water,
turning it from shattered silver to slate.

White from the heavy winter snowfall, the Olympic mountains
rose between Laenea and the port. The approaching rain hid even the trails of
spacecraft escaping the earth, and the glint of shuttles returning to their
target in the sea. She would see them again soon. She laughed aloud, stretching
against the soreness in her chest and the ache of her ribs, throwing back her
tangled wavy hair. It tickled the nape of her neck.

The door opened and air moved past her as if the room were
breathing. Laenea turned and faced Dr. van de Graaf. The surgeon was tiny and
frail looking, and her hands possessed strength like steel wires. She glanced
at the shattered amplifier and shook her head.

“Was that necessary?”

“Yes,” Laenea said. “For my peace of
mind.”

“It was here for your peace of mind.”

“It has the opposite effect.”

“The administrators feel there’s no reason to
change the procedure,” she said. “We’ve been doing it since
the first pilots.”

“The administrators are known for continuing bad
advice.”

“Well, pilot, soon you can design your own
environment.”

“When?”

“Soon. I don’t mean to be obscure — I
decide when you can leave the hospital, but when you may leave takes more than
my word. The scar tissue needs time to strengthen. Do you want to go already? I
cracked your ribs rather thoroughly.”

Laenea grinned. “I know.” She was strapped up
tight and straight, but she could feel each juncture of rib end and cartilage.

“It will be a few days at least.”

“How long has it been?”

“Since surgery? About forty-eight hours.”

“It seemed like weeks.”

“Well… adjusting to all the changes at once has
proved to be quite a shock for most people. Sleeping seems to help.”

“I’m an experiment,” Laenea said.
“All of us are. With experiments, you should experiment.”

“We’ve made enough pilots so your group
isn’t an experiment anymore. We’ve found this works best.”

“But when I heard the heartbeat,” Laenea said,
“I thought you’d had to put me back to normal.”

“It’s meant to be a comforting sound.”

“No one else ever complained?”

“Not quite so strongly,” van de Graaf said, then
dismissed the subject. “It’s done now, pilot.”

It
was
finished, for Laenea. She shrugged.
“When can I leave?” she asked again. The hospital was one more
place of stasis that Laenea was anxious to escape.

“For now, go back to bed. Morning’s soon enough
to talk about the future.”

Laenea turned away. The windows, the walls, the filtered air
cut her off from the gray clouds and the city.

“Pilot —”

Rain slipped down the glass. Laenea stayed where she was.
She did not feel like sleeping.

The doctor sighed. “Do something for me, pilot.”

Laenea shrugged again.

“I want you to test your control.”

Laenea acquiesced with sullen silence.

“Speed your heart up slowly, and pay attention to the
results.”

Laenea intensified the firing of the nerve.

“What do you feel?”

“Nothing,” Laenea said, though her blood, impelled
by the smooth rotary pump, rushed through what had been her pulse points:
temples, throat, wrists.

Beside her the surgeon frowned. “Increase a little
more, but very slowly.”

Laenea obeyed. Bright lights flashed just behind her vision.
Her head hurt in a streak above her right eye to the back of her skull. She
felt high and excited. She turned away from the window. “I want to get
out of here.”

Van de Graaf touched her arm at the wrist; Laenea laughed
aloud at the idea of feeling for
her
pulse. The doctor led her to a
chair by the window. “Sit down.” But Laenea felt she could climb
the helix of her dizziness: She felt no need for rest.

“Sit
down
.” The voice was whispery, soft
sand slipping across stone. Laenea obeyed.

“Remember the rest of your training. It’s
important to vary your blood pressure. Sit back. Slow the pump. Expand the
capillaries. Relax.”

Laenea called back her biocontrol. For the first time she
was conscious of a presence rather than an absence. Her pulse was gone, but in
its place she felt the constant quiet hum of a perfectly balanced rotary
machine. It pushed her blood through her body so efficiently that the pressure
would destroy her, if she let it. She relaxed and slowed the pump, expanded and
contracted arterial muscles, once, twice, again. The headache, the light
flashes, the ringing in her ears faded and ceased.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“That’s better,” the surgeon said.
“Don’t forget how that feels. You can’t go at high speed very
long, you’ll turn your brain to cheese. You can feel fine for quite a
while, you can feel intoxicated. But the hangover is more than I care to reckon
with.” She folded her arms. “I want to keep you here till
we’re sure you can regulate the machine. I don’t like doing kidney
transplants.”

“I can control it.” Laenea began to induce a
slow, arrhythmic change in the speed of the new pump, in her blood pressure.
She found she could do it without thinking, as was necessary to balance the
flow. “Can I have the ashes of my heart?”

“Not yet.”

“But —”

“I want to be sure.”

Somewhere in the winding concrete labyrinth of the hospital,
Laenea’s heart still beat, bathed in warm saline and nutrient solution.
As long as it existed, as long as it lived, Laenea would feel threatened in her
ambitions. She could not be a starship pilot and remain a normal human being,
with normal human rhythms. Her body still could reject the artificial heart;
then she would be made ordinary again. If she could work at all she would have
to remain a crew member, anesthetized throughout every journey in transit at
superluminal speeds. She did not think she could stand that any longer.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I won’t
be back.”

o0o

On the exposed side of a tiny, rocky island with a single
twisted tree growing at its summit, Orca, the diver, lay in a tide pool,
letting waves splash against her and over her. She needed a few minutes of
concentration, calm, and the sea to wash away her anger. She did not want the
long and pleasant swim to the spaceport spoiled, as it would be if she replayed
the fight with her father again and again, trying to think of how she could
have kept discussion from turning into disagreement, or how she could have made
him understand her position.

The sun spread an evening dazzle across the water, reddening
the clouds that concealed Vancouver Island.

In the midst of the bright waves, Orca’s brother
surfaced. Treading water, he gestured to her. She shook her head and beckoned
to him to come to her. His patience was ten times hers, but he was too
inexperienced, too naive, to suspect she wanted him to join her because it was
easier to argue about air things in surface language, or, rather, because it
was easier for her to win the argument. Finally he dove again, and a moment
later snaked up beside her on the rocks. Like Orca, he was small and fine
boned, dark skinned and fair haired.

“Dad’s upset,” he said.

“I figured.”

She loved her younger brother, and she felt sorry for him at
times like these. He had spent most of his life trying to be the intermediary
between Orca and their father. Orca had long ago resigned herself to never
having anything more than superficial contact with the elder diver, but her
brother never gave up trying to reconcile them. Their father had been a youth
during the revolution; he had fought in it. He had to accept her choosing an
outside profession, one that put her in close contact with landers, but he
could never be graceful about it. He was indifferent to her coworkers’
being, as she was, members of the starship crew. They were all landers to him.