Superluminal (2 page)

Like many of his generation, though more vehemently than
most, he disapproved when younger divers took salvage or exploration jobs with
lander companies. He knew they needed the money for lab equipment and research
materials, yet he loathed every contact divers had with ordinary people. He
despised Orca’s profession, and sometimes she felt he despised her as
well.

“Can’t you give in just a little?”

“Give in! He as much as called me a coward!”

“He knows you aren’t that.”

“I think it’s his turn to apologize for a
change.”

“He doesn’t understand your objections.”

“He
won’t
understand,” Orca said.
“There’s a difference.”

“Maybe there is,” her brother said. “Would
you be mad at me if I told you I don’t understand, either? I’m
trying, please believe me. But if you disagree with the change, why have you
worked outside for so long? You make more money than anybody else in the
family, you’re the one who’s paid for most of the research.”

“I just didn’t expect it to be done so
soon,” she said, knowing the excuse to be a lame one. She had tried
before to explain to members of her family that she had joined the starship
crew for itself, not for the pay. Her mother understood, but her father thought
she said so just to make him angry, and her brother thought she only said so to
keep everyone from feeling guilty because she had to spend so much time away
from home.

“If I get back in time, I’ll come home for the
transition meeting,” Orca said.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to stay till afterwards?
If you go, and you’re late getting home, you won’t be able to say
what you think about the change.”

Orca sighed and said nothing. She was sick of the argument.
She had answered all the questions twenty times. It was six weeks until the
meeting. If she took more leave from the crew, she would fall even further
behind on the seniority list. The longer she took to work her way up, the
longer before she could get on a mission more interesting than a milk run.

“I can’t
talk
to you up here,” her
brother said plaintively. “Come back into the water.”

“When I get back in the water,” Orca said,
“I’m going to start swimming and I’m not going to stop till I
get to the port. If you want to come along,
petit frère
, that’s
fine.” She wished he would join her; she thought it would do him good.

He let himself slide into the tide pool until only his head
and shoulders rose above the water. He acted as if he might turn around and
swim angrily away. But he never got angry. He found anger incomprehensible, as
far as Orca could tell. Of all the divers, her younger brother was the most
distant from being human. He had never been to a lander city, never worked for
one of their companies, never attended a mainland school. He had met perhaps
three ordinary humans in his whole life. Her brother had never even adopted a
surface nickname. He and her father acted the same way, when it came to land
dwellers. But their reasons were as completely different as it was possible to
be. Father avoided landers because he hated and despised them. Her brother was
simply uninterested.

“You spend too much time with the cousins,” Orca
said.

“You spend too little time with them,” he
replied. “They miss you. They ask about you when you’re
gone.”

And, too, whenever she returned, they asked about where she
had been. They listened to her descriptions of working on the crew, of being in
space, of visiting alien worlds. At first they asked how it felt to travel
faster than light. She regretted being unable to tell them: She, too, would
have liked to know. But she was not a pilot, so she had to sleep when her ship
entered transit. She could not experience superluminal travel, and survive.
Though the cousins never criticized her for leaving, she often doubted that she
explained her reasons as comprehensibly as she described her actions.

Her brother said sadly, “I don’t understand why
you go.”

“I have to,” Orca said. She pushed herself down
into the warm salty pool. “This isn’t enough for me.”

“How can’t it be? Not enough? We haven’t
learned ten percent of what the cousins are trying to teach us.”

Orca sometimes wondered if that was exactly the reason she
fled to space. Her family lived among aliens, and it was clear to her, if to no
one else, that the cousins were so far beyond the family that understanding
them was impossible. In their presence she had always felt like a child, and
she knew she always would. On the starship crew she was an adult.

She pushed off toward her brother and glided past him
underwater, turning over and blowing a stream of bubbles up against his chest,
his stomach, his genitals. He was terribly ticklish: He doubled over laughing
and turned the motion into a dive. He streaked around to chase her. Orca dove
out of the tide pool, into the sea. The cold water hit her like a shock. Her
brother was right behind her. She surfaced; he came straight up from the bottom
and propelled himself out of the water, half his height, before falling back.

Orca scooped water up in her webbed hand and flung it
playfully at him. He sputtered and shook his head, flinging his pale hair back
from his face.

Orca kissed him. He embraced her, then let her go.

“Do you want company?”

“Only if you’ll come all the way.”

He hesitated. “No. Maybe sometime, but not now.”

She nodded; he sank down under the surface. As he passed
beneath her he spun around, letting his hand flick up and slide along the
length of her body and legs.

Then he was gone.

Orca turned in the other direction, dove, and struck out
down the strait, heading for the spaceport.

o0o

Though Laenea felt strong enough to walk, a wheelchair carried
her through the halls as tests and questions and examinations devoured several
days in chunks and nibbles. The boredom grew more and more wearing. The pains
had faded, the accelerated healing was nearly complete, and still Laenea saw
only doctors and attendants and machines. Her friends stayed away. This was a
rite of passage she must survive alone.

A day went by in which she saw neither the rain that passed,
nor the sunset that was obscured by fog. She asked again when she could leave
the hospital. The answers were evasions. She allowed herself to become angry,
and still no one would respond.

Evening, back in her room: Laenea was wide awake. She lay in
bed and slid her fingers across her collarbone, down to the sternum, along the
shiny red line of the long scar. It was still tender, covered with translucent
synthetic skin, crossed once just below her breasts with a wide bandage to ease
her cracked ribs.

The efficient new heart intrigued her. She consciously
slowed its pace, then went through the exercise of constricting and dilating
arteries and capillaries. Her biocontrol was excellent. It had to be, or she
would not have been approved for surgery.

Slowing the pump should have produced a pleasant lethargy
and eventual sleep, but adrenaline from her anger lingered and she did not want
to rest. Nor did she want a sleeping pill. She was done with taking drugs.
Dreamless drug sleep was the worst kind of all. Fear built up, undischarged by
fantasy, producing a great and formless tension.

The twilight was the texture of gray watered silk, opaque
and irregular. The hospital’s pastels turned cold and mysterious. Laenea
threw off the sheet. She was strong again; she was healed. She had undergone a
year of training, major surgery, and these final days of boredom to free
herself from biological rhythms. There was no reason in the world why she
should sleep, like others, when darkness fell.

The hospital retained a few advantages of civilization. Her
clothes were in the closet, not squirreled away in some locked room. She put on
black pants, soft leather boots, and a shiny leather vest that laced up the
front, leaving her arms and neck bare. The gap between the laces revealed the
livid pilot’s scar from one sharp tip at her throat to the other below
her breastbone.

To avoid arguments, she waited until the corridor was
deserted. Green paint, meant to be soothing, had gone flat and ugly with age.
Her boots were silent on the resilient tile, but in the hollow shaft of the
fire stairs the heels clattered against concrete, echoing past her and back.
Her legs were tired when she reached bottom. She speeded the flow of blood.

Outside, mist obscured the stars. The moon had risen, full
and haloed. Streetlights spread Laenea’s shadow out around her like the
spokes of a wheel.

A rank of electric cars waited at the corner, tethered like
horses in an old movie. She slid her credit key into a lock to release one
painted like a turtle, an apt analogy. She got in and drove it toward the
waterfront. The little beast rolled along, its motor humming quietly on the
flat, straining in low gear on the steep downgrades. Laenea relaxed and wished
she were back in space, but her imagination could not stretch that far. The
turtle could not become a starship; and the city, while pleasant, was of unrelieved
ordinariness compared to the alien places she had seen. She could not, of
course, imagine transit, for it was beyond imagination. Language or mind was
insufficient. Transit had never been described.

The waterfront was shabby, dirty, magnetic. Laenea knew she
could find acquaintances nearby, but she did not want to stay in the city. She
returned the turtle to a stanchion and retrieved her credit key to halt the
tally against her account.

The night had grown cold; she noticed the change
peripherally as fog, and cobblestones slick with condensation. The public
market, ramshackle and shored up, littered here and there with wilted
vegetables, was deserted. People passed as shadows.

A man moved up behind her while she was in the dim region
between two streetlamps. “Hey,” he said, “how about —”
His tone was belligerent with inexperience or insecurity or fear. Looking down
at him, surprised, Laenea laughed. “Poor fool —” He scuttled
away like a crab. After a moment of vague pity and amusement, Laenea forgot him.
She shivered. Her ears were ringing and her chest ached from the cold.

Small shops nestled between bars and cheap restaurants.
Laenea entered one for the warmth. It was very dim, darker than the street,
high ceilinged and deep, so narrow she could have touched both side walls by
stretching out her arms. She did not. She hunched her shoulders and the ache
receded slightly.

“May I help you?”

Like one of the shop’s indistinct masses brought to
life, a small ancient man appeared. He was dressed in ill-matched clothes, part
of his own wares. Hung up like trophies, feathers and wide hats and beads
covered the walls of the secondhand clothing store. Laenea moved farther
inside.

“Ah, pilot,” the old man said, “you honor
me.”

Laenea’s delight was childish in its intensity. He was
the first person outside the hospital, in the real world, to call her by her
new title.

“It’s cold by the water,” she said. Some
graciousness or apology was due, for she had no intention of buying anything.

“A coat? No, a cloak!” he exclaimed. “A
cloak would be set off well by a person of your stature.” He turned; his
dark form disappeared among the piles and racks of clothes. Laenea saw bright
beads and spangles, a quick flash of gold lamé, and wondered uncharitably what
dreadful theater costume he would choose. But he held up a long swath of black,
lined with scarlet. Laenea had planned to thank him and demur; despite herself
she reached out. Velvet silk outside and smooth satin silk within caressed her
fingers. The cloak had a single shoulder cape and a clasp of carved jet. Though
heavy, it draped easily and gracefully. She slung it over her shoulders, and it
flowed around her almost to her ankles.

“Exquisite,” the shopkeeper said. He beckoned
and she approached. A dim and pitted full-length mirror stood against the wall
beyond him. Bronze patches marred its face where the silver had peeled away.
Laenea liked the way the cape looked. She folded its edges so the scarlet
lining showed, so her throat and the upper curve of her breasts and the tip of
the scar were exposed. She shook back her hair.

“Not quite that,” she said, smiling. She was too
tall and big-boned for delicacy. She had a widow’s peak and high
cheekbones, but her jaw was strong and square.

“It does not please you.” He sounded downcast.
Laenea could not quite place his faint accent.

“It does,” she said. “I’ll take
it.”

He bowed her toward the front of the shop, and she took out
her credit key.

“No, no, pilot,” he said. “Not
that.”

Laenea raised one eyebrow. A few shops on the waterfront
accepted only cash, retaining an illicit flavor in a time when almost any
activity was legal. But few even of those select establishments would refuse
the credit of a crew member or a pilot.

“I have no cash,” Laenea said. She had stopped
carrying it years ago, since the time she found in various pockets three coins
of metal, one of plastic, one of wood, a pleasingly atavistic animal claw (or
excellent duplicate), and a boxed bit of organic matter that would have been
forbidden on earth fifty years before. Laenea never expected to revisit at
least three of the worlds the currency represented.

“No cash,” he said. “It is yours, pilot.
Only —” He glanced up. His eyes were very dark and deep, hopeful,
expectant. “Only tell me, what is it like? What do you see?”

He was the first person to ask her that question. People
asked it often, of pilots. She had asked it herself, wordlessly after the first
few times of silence and patient head-shakings. The pilots never answered.
Machines could not answer, pilots could not answer. Or would not. The question
was answerable only individually. Laenea felt sorry for the shopkeeper. She
started to say she had not yet been in transit awake, that she was new, that
she had only traveled in the crew, drugged near death to stay alive. But,
finally, she could not say even that. It was too easy; it was an untrue truth.
It implied she would tell him if she knew, while she did not know if she could
or would. She shook her head; she smiled gently. “I’m sorry.”