Superluminal (14 page)

“I mean, what do they do?” He imagined some
complicated electronic function that could be attained only by enzymatic
manipulation of matter into forms too delicate and precise to be created by
mechanical technology.

“Do? They don’t do anything. They’re
jewels, if you like. They’re decorative. That’s the sort of thing
that succeeds in the earth trade.”

“Oh.” Radu felt vaguely disappointed. Electronic
components would all have been the same. He should have thought of that. Each
wyuna was unique: Success rewarded uniqueness in the earth trade. Most imported
items were merely decorative. The wood Radu’s home world exported was
beautiful, but it could be put to useful purposes. Still, for all Radu knew,
once it reached earth it was carved into meaningless trinkets.

He held a jewel up to the light, for one last glimpse of its
spectral colors. Then he lowered it and extended his hand to Atna, to return
the wyunas.

Atna stared at them, his face expressionless. He did not
move.

“Atna? Are you all right? What’s the
matter?” Radu touched Atna’s arm.

“What?” Atna looked up, stepped back, shook his
head, and gazed again at the jewels Radu was trying to return.
“No,” he said. “Keep them.” His voice was distant.
“Give some to Orca and Vaska, if you like. They’ll be a curiosity
when you go back to earth. For a few days, anyway.”

Radu nearly gave them back anyway. He had no use for them.
Then he remembered Laenea’s friend Marc, and his “pretty
things.” Radu closed his hand around the wyunas. He could give them to
Laenea, for Marc.

Do I need an excuse to see her? he wondered. Will we never
even be able to speak to each other, if not as lovers, at least as friends?

“Thank you,” he said to Atna. He put the organic
jewels in his pocket. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

“Yes.”

It was time to go back to the landing field; Radu felt the
minutes flowing gradually toward takeoff. Back in the forest, the pale ferns
concealed the iridescent orchard.

Atna led in silence, staring at the ground, his shoulders
hunched. Even his footsteps were noiseless. Sunlight passing through foliage
dappled his dark skin with gold and green. At the edge of the runway, among
uncleared stumps and weeds, he stopped. The truck had been wheeled out to the
end of the landing strip again, ready to take off.

“Good-bye, Atna.”

They embraced, as crew members always did when parting. Atna
put his head on Radu’s shoulder and hugged him tightly, and Radu rubbed
his hands up and down the older man’s back, just as if he were helping
him awaken. When Atna drew back, he held Radu by the shoulders as if unwilling
to let him go.

“Something
is
wrong,” Radu said.

“Don’t leave,” Atna said.
“Don’t go back to earth. Something’s going to happen.”

Radu frowned, curious, confused.

“You’re in danger.”

“In danger? What —?”

“In the orchard, I saw… I can’t explain to
you what happened. You didn’t grow up here, you wouldn’t
understand. I dreamed… I had a vision. I’m afraid for you.”

Radu stared at him blankly. “I
don’t…”

“Something’s going to happen to the ship and
you’re part of it,” Atna said desperately. “You’re in
the middle of it. I think perhaps you
are
it.”

Radu shook his head.

“Don’t dismiss me!”

“But I have to go back to the ship.”

“Of course you have to take the cargo back, but
Ngthummulun has a shuttle truck. I can send it for you. And for Orca. Tell her
there’s a lovely place to swim, a deepwater mountain lake —”

“It’s impossible.” Radu stepped away from
him. “The ship can’t fly without a crew.”

“Vaska can get the ship from orbit to a transit point.
After that it doesn’t matter. I don’t think it will ever come out
again.”

“I’m to warn Orca, but desert the pilot?”

“You can tell him if you want. But he won’t pay
any attention. Pilots never think they can fail. I can’t save him. I
can’t save the cargo. You and Orca are the only ones I can warn.”

“But you
know
it’s impossible.”

“At least give Orca a chance to decide for herself.
Will you tell her what I’ve said?”

“When you know she’ll have no choice,
either?”

“Please tell her, Radu.”

“All right!” In his confusion, he spoke harshly.
He regretted both the harshness and the agreement instantly. Badly shaken, Radu
reached out and clasped Atna’s hand; he touched his forehead. “Atna,
do you feel well?”

Atna’s vision was all too similar to the desperate
fantasies of plague hallucination, but the navigator had no fever, nor any of
the other symptoms Radu would quickly have recognized.

“Do you mean, am I ill? Am I crazy? No, neither, I
understand what I’m asking. I don’t want to frighten you
—” He spoke quickly and urgently. “No, I do. Please do as I
ask.”

“I have to leave.”

Atna hesitated. “You’re sure?” The tension
had gone from his voice.

“Yes.”

“Then good-bye.”

They hugged again, briefly and without intensity. Atna
behaved as if he thought of Radu as already dead, already lost.

Atna turned and walked into the forest without another word.

o0o

Making the last-minute checks of the shuttle truck’s
systems, Radu tried to push away the grim, cold feeling Atna’s words had
given him. Things happened to ships in transit — sometimes things
happened to ships even in normal space. Atna’s fear and agitation had
infected him, and reminded him of experiences he had tried to forget. He found
concentrating difficult.

Atna had given him an impossible demand. Without the
navigator the ship was short-handed to begin with. Besides, Radu had already
taken as much time off as he dared. If all he did was take vacations, he should
go back to Twilight. His home needed either his labor or the currency he earned
on the crew.

What troubled Radu most was the possibility that Atna might
be ill. Not with Twilight’s plague: He had none of those symptoms and the
cryptovirus that caused it had been, it was claimed, eliminated. But some other
disease… He asked a few questions of the shuttle’s computer;
finding no useful information in its limited records, he directed it to tap
into the transit ship’s database. No epidemics were on report, here or
elsewhere; the computer could not find a disease that matched the information
Radu offered it.

Vasili broke into the flow of data.

“What are you doing with the computer? Do you realize
what time it is?”

Radu noticed with a shock how close he was to the end of the
launch window. Vasili’s irritation was justified.

“Something’s wrong here, Vasili
Nikolaievich,” Radu said.

“Atna just said some very odd things to me. I’m
worried that—”

Vasili cut him off, laughing. “You mean he told you
your fortune?”

“Well… I wouldn’t put it quite that
way.”

“People from Ngthummulun are always claiming to know
the future.”

“Oh,” Radu said.

“Come back to the ship, right now. We don’t have
time to waste with this nonsense.”

A few minutes later, Radu put power to the cargo truck. It
lumbered down the runway, faster and faster, and hoisted itself forcibly into
the air.

After an unexciting flight, Radu docked well, sliding the
shuttle against its fittings with a satisfying sharp snap that rang through the
craft’s skin. He relaxed his hold on the controls. His knuckles were
white and his palms damp.

He had wanted to dock perfectly, but did not quite know why
it was so important. To prove he had never thought they were all exposed to a
serious illness? To prove he thought nothing of Atna’s visions? To show
off? If so, to whom? Orca? Vasili Nikolaievich?

“Hurry in,” the pilot said over the radio.
“I want to leave orbit immediately.”

Amused despite himself, Radu realized that the pilot would
hardly even notice anything as trivial as a good manual docking in normal
space.

He shut down the controls and the onboard computer,
preparing it for transit. He spoke soothing words to it. Though it was not
self-aware, he always talked to it when he was alone. It could hear him, it
could understand the patterns of his words, but whether it understood words
spoken as if to a child going off to sleep, he did not know.

Unfastening his harness, he floated out of his chair, opened
the roof hatch, and pulled himself from the region of freefall into artificial
gravity. He felt the familiar lurch and strain, but now the unsettled feeling
did not linger, as it had when he first encountered it.

I wonder if I’ll ever get too used to it to notice? he
thought.

o0o

Radu went reluctantly into the control room to speak to
Vasili. The pilot lay back in his chair, watching the computer display as it
changed in colors and waves before him.

“Are you all calmed down now?” he said, without
looking around.

“I had good reason for being worried,” Radu
said.

“Maybe someone should have warned you that the inhabitants
of Ngthummulun can be quite strange. But I thought you knew Atna.”

“I’ve crewed with him before. Apparently I
don’t know him as well as I thought.”

“You were concerned about him, and about us as well, I
assume. That’s commendable, even if it wasn’t necessary. Stop
worrying about it.”

Radu fingered the wyunas in his pocket, drew one out, and
offered it to Vasili.

“Atna asked me to give you one of these, if you want
it.”

Vasili glanced at it with disinterest. “Thanks, but I
don’t wear jewelry. Can you find out how long Orca will be? We’re
near a transit point.”

Feeling that he had behaved stupidly ever since waking up,
Radu shoved the wyuna back into his pocket and left.

o0o

Radu climbed down into the engine room. The high and low
notes of the resting transit engines beat together around him. The amber light
of an information display glowed beyond banks of control nets. He started
toward it.

“Orca?”

“Just a sec.”

Kneeling beside one of the nets, reaching deep into its
interstices, Orca watched the display that hung in the air beside her. She was
forcing the repair of a broken connection. The information she was reading
looked, to Radu, like numbers studded along a tangle of electric-orange string.
From his point of view the numbers were backward.

Radu watched quietly, until Orca sat on her heels with a
sigh, freed her hands from the net, and stretched. The data block faded out.

“Nice docking,” she said cheerfully.

“Thanks,” Radu said, pleased she had noticed.

“How’s Atna?”

“He sent these.” Radu handed her several of the
wyunas.

“So that’s why we’re here,” she
said. She looked at them closely. “They’re even prettier than he
said. Thank you. But how is he?”

“He looked much better after he landed…”
After what Vasili had told him, it seemed hardly necessary, indeed foolish, to
tell Orca of Atna’s fears. Even if he had promised.

“I’ve been worried about him,” Orca said.
She raised one eyebrow, silently questioning the uncertainty in Radu’s
tone.

“He’s worried about us,” Radu said.
Because he had promised.

“Why?”

“He had… a premonition, I suppose… that
something will happen to the ship in transit. He wants us to stay behind with
him.”

Orca cupped the wyunas in her webbed hand, shook them so
they rang together softly, and stared at them intently.

“He was very upset,” Radu said. “He made
me promise to tell you and Vasili Nikolaievich. The pilot said it was
nothing.” When Orca did not reply, he continued. “If you want to
stay —”

She touched his hand without looking at him, and he fell
silent. He watched her, disturbed by her reaction. Two short vertical frown
lines deepened on her forehead, then smoothed and vanished. The engine’s
eerie pulsations continued; the wind-chime touch of the wyunas reminded Radu of
Ngthummulun’s forest.

Orca took a breath, exhaled, and closed her hand into a
fist.

“All right,” she said. “It’s all
right. What were you saying?”

“Do you want to go down to Ngthummulun?”

“No. Do you?”

Radu shook his head. “Then you agree with Vasili, that
there’s nothing to Atna’s dream?”

“On the contrary. Atna’s dreams are as real as
this world. They’re another level of reality. Another way of perceiving
things. I’m not explaining this right. I’m not sure you can, in
Standard. If we were underwater —” She shrugged helplessly.

“You’re staying on the ship.”

“I don’t get any resonances from his perception.
I don’t feel a threat. To me, I mean.”

“I would have assumed you’d dismiss it out of
hand.”

“No — and I would have assumed you’d take
him more seriously.”

Radu shivered suddenly.

“I’m sorry,” Orca said, in response to his
silence. “I didn’t mean that as an insult.”

“No, I — I didn’t take it as one. I just
can’t…”

Again she waited for him to finish his thought; again he
failed to speak.

“Atna’s frame of reference is a whole lot
different from mine, and I suppose from yours,” Orca said. “But
I’ve learned to take it seriously.”

They walked together back to the crew lounge, to report to
the pilot, to make the final preparations for transit, to ready themselves for
sleep. At a porthole, Orca paused and looked out at Ngthummulun.

“Besides,” she said, “this place has a
million lakes and no ocean. I’d sooner vacation in a bathtub.”

o0o

In the box room, Radu and Orca hugged each other good-bye.
Orca lay down and positioned her face mask. In a few seconds she was asleep.
Radu closed her in.

The computer spoke softly to remind Radu of the time.

“I know the time!” he said, angry for reasons he
did not understand. He sat on the edge of his chamber, pulled off his boots,
and flung them into a corner. Bending down, he rested his forehead on his
crossed arms for a moment. Then, calmly and surely, for his life depended on
it, he prepared himself for transit and went to sleep.