Superluminal (25 page)

Radu wished Vasili were staying behind. But Ramona had
chosen him because, of all the pilots, he was best. Officially, he was to pilot
Ramona home, then fly the ship back to earth.

They boarded the transit ship and undocked from Earthstation.
Vasili began working out a course to the transit point that had begun
Laenea’s training.

“This ship is off course,” the computer’s
voice said, when the display lights flickered from dead center. “Shall I
bring up second level navigational aids?”

“Shut down the cerebral functions,” Vasili said.
“The last thing I need is a lecture.”

Radu obeyed, cutting off the helpful protest by shunting the
computer to transit mode.

“P-2709, this is Earthstation. We show you drifting,
pilot, are you having difficulties?”

“No difficulties, Earthstation, I show no
drift.”

“You’re drifting, pilot, you’re half a
radian off course and several degrees above the plane.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Ramona drew Orca out of the transmitter’s pickup area.

“Orca, get to sleep quickly. They’ll be
screaming at us in a moment, and when they realize we’re going to use the
wrong transit point they might even send someone after us. We won’t have
time to circle back.”

“Okay,” Orca said. “Good luck.”

Radu accompanied her to her sleep chamber. She had already
prepared it. Radu hugged her, memorizing the pressure of her arms around him,
the touch of her strong hands on his back. She kissed him on the throat, at the
corner of his jaw. His pulse beat against the light pressure of her lips. She
had not kissed him before, and Radu had time only to wonder, not to ask, if she
meant more by it than the customary parting.

Orca pulled away from him slowly, sliding her hands along
his back and his sides and then grasping his forearms.

“Good luck,” she said again.

“I’m very glad not to be all alone,” Radu
said.

“A big lot of good I’ll be, sound asleep, but —”
She shrugged, stepped inside her body box, and sat down. “But
there’s no help for it.” She grinned. “Unless you figure out
what it is you do, and teach the rest of us.” She double checked to be
sure the programming was correct.

“Radu —”

“Yes?”

She glanced away, then looked at him intently. “Well,
hell. It isn’t as if you’re a pilot. What did you see?”

Radu blinked, not understanding her. Then he laughed. Orca
sat back, frowning.

“Never mind,” she said. “Forget it.”
She reached for the anesthetic mask.

Radu stopped her. “No, don’t yet, I’m
sorry. I only laughed because I haven’t even thought about it since —”

“Why should you? You
know
.”

He shook his head. “That’s just it. I
don’t. I didn’t see anything — there was nothing to see. It
was like looking out into thick fog, fog that went on forever, with nothing
even concealed inside it.”

“You mean it’s all lies? All these years and
mysteries and we’ve been wondering about
lies
?”

“I don’t know,” Radu said. “Maybe
what makes us different from pilots is we can’t see what’s really
out there. Or maybe what makes them different from us is that they create what
they experience. I just don’t know.”

“‘Who knows, with pilots?’” Orca
said softly.

Radu’s sense of time tugged itself into a conscious
thought. “The alarm is about to go off, Orca, you only have a few minutes
to get to sleep.”

“Okay,” she said, and patted his arm.
“Take care of yourself out there.” She lay back, pulled the mask
over her mouth and nose, and breathed deeply. Soon her pupils dilated, and her
eyelids drooped. Radu unlaced her red shoes, slipped them off her feet, and
stowed them under her sleep chamber. The boxes were of standard size, so she
looked very small inside one. Radu had the momentary urge to find a blanket and
tuck it in around her. Instead, he closed the lid over her and stood up.

Ramona-Teresa came into the box room as the automatic alarm
chimed its warning.

“She’s asleep,” Radu said.

“Good. As far as the instruments are concerned, so are
you.” She left the room again. Radu did not take her rapid departure as
an insult; she, too, had to prepare herself for transit. Neither Ramona-Teresa
nor Vasili Nikolaievich could risk having their concentration or their
biocontrol disturbed.

The seconds flowed away. Radu considered, one last time,
what he was trying to do. It was no better than a game in which a possible
solution was death, a game for which he did not know all the rules. But the
prize for winning was very great, and it was too late to resign from the
competition.

He spun around to face the port just in time to watch starry
black space fade delicately to silver gray. He stopped moving, stopped
breathing, awaiting the changes that would begin if his strange ability had
only been temporary. But it was just the same as last time: Nothing happened at
all. He returned to the control room.

The pilots had put on their oxygen tanks and breathing
masks. Vasili was watching something move across his field of view —
something invisible, as far as Radu was concerned. Ramona-Teresa focused her
gaze on infinity.

“I’m going to follow the flight plan Miikala
filed,” Vasili said, “as near as I can, anyway.” He took a
breath. When he spoke again, sarcasm slid into his voice. “And then I
suppose you want to take over piloting.”

“I don’t know yet,” Radu said calmly.

“You won’t have much time to decide what to do,
because theirs was a short flight,” the pilot said, “and we
can’t just keep going indefinitely, or there’s no telling where
we’ll end up.” He breathed from his oxygen mask.

“Maybe that’s what happened to them.”

“I keep trying to make you understand how this
works,” Vasili said so angrily that he had to stop immediately and take
another isolated breath. “You’re all right if you know your
starting point and your destination, or your start and a familiar route, you
can go a little way beyond, but not indefinitely without coming out and taking
a look, because you get
lost
.” He turned his back on Radu and
began working on the interface between the ship’s computer and the
computer he had liberated from the exploration team.

“Let’s wait until we reach the end of
Miikala’s flight plan before we worry about what to do, Vaska,”
Ramona said mildly, then, turning to Radu, “and since if you did perceive
Laenea you did it while you were asleep, I suggest you try to go to sleep now
and see what happens.”

“I guess I should,” Radu said. He hesitated,
looking out into the gray viewscreen. He felt an unreasonable reluctance to take
Ramona’s advice, sensible though it was. If he went to sleep and did not
dream of Laenea, that would mean, to him, that she was dead.

Only when Vasili glanced at him with a quizzical expression
did Radu leave the control room.

In the crew lounge, he kicked off his boots and lay on the
couch. He shifted around, trying to get comfortable, but after a while he gave
up trying to force himself to sleep. He got up again.

After the past few days he should feel exhausted, but he was
wide awake and restless, alert and nervous. In transit, he still felt reluctant
to give himself up to normal sleep.

He was tempted to make himself a cup of coffee, but that
would further delay what he needed to do. And he already knew how useless sleep
drugs would be.

He poked around in the galley — no matter what
happened on this flight, he still had the least seniority of anyone on board
and was therefore, he assumed, responsible for the cooking.

The ordinary tasks helped to relax him. He rested his elbows
on the narrow ledge and stared out into the grayness. His description to Orca
had been slightly inaccurate. Fog, indeed, but not a great depth of it. It had
no depth. One did not so much look into it as at it. It had neither form nor
texture, and only his imagination gave it the bright sparkles at the edge of
his vision.

Perhaps he would see more if he stared long enough; perhaps
it was sensory deprivation that created whatever the pilots saw.

He did not believe that.

Yet gradually, imperceptibly, the soft gray soothed him. He
yawned, and he felt the wandering of his attention, the softly distracted state
of mind, brought on by sleepiness. He breathed very slowly and regularly, long
deep breaths with as little concentration as he could manage: He let his
conscious thoughts sink down and away. The sounds of his body, his steady
breathing, his strong, slow heartbeat, blended into the low vibration of the
ship’s engines. It was too much trouble to take the few steps to the
couch, too much effort to fight the great lethargy overwhelming him. He sank
down, sliding his hands along the cool glass and the muted swirls of color on
the wall. He curled up on the deck, his back pressed into the corner’s
comforting solidity, his cheek resting on his arm, and, there, he fell asleep.

o0o

Radu felt cold. He shivered uncontrollably and his fingers
and toes lost all feeling as he fought his way through an impenetrable
snowstorm. Walking on ground that was flat and featureless, he moved slowly
with his arms outstretched. He could see only as far as his hands could reach.
But he encountered no obstructions, no trees, no brush, no irregularities of
the land. And there was no sound: Even his footsteps were completely muffled.

The storm continued, but he could make out a faint path
beneath the drifted covering.

Radu broke every rule he had ever learned about surviving in
the wilderness. He was lost and he should stay still, but here he was, plowing
through shin-deep powder snow to follow a nearly obliterated path. He should
stay still, so he could be found.

So he could be found: He laughed.

Seconds were the only measure of the distance that he
traveled, and without thinking about it he kept track of them. The path made a
right-angle turn. Radu followed.

At the second turn, he stopped short.

He knew how easy it was to become confused and disoriented
while lost. Without a point of reference, distance and direction were
meaningless. He looked back over his track but could not see where he had
turned before, and the path he had broken was rapidly filling in.

There was no way to prove it, no way even to demonstrate it
to himself, but he was certain in his own mind that this third path lay
perpendicular to the other two. Yet the ground was still monotonously flat, and
the only dimension left over was up and down.

He turned along the third path reluctantly. It was solid and
reassuring, it felt just the same; he experienced no awkward change in gravity
and the snow still fell from “up.”

When the fourth path appeared, perpendicular to the other
three, he nearly succeeded in finding it all quite funny.

When he was younger, studying elementary mathematics, he had
conquered three-dimensional geometry by brute force. Four spatial dimensions
had fought him to a draw; he could manipulate the formulae but not visualize
what they represented. Five dimensions had ambushed him and left him so bruised
he did not even have an ambition for revenge. Yet he turned onto a fifth path,
which again lay perpendicular to all the rest, and he navigated it quite
easily.

How long could this go on? He had heard of, though never
studied, geometries with an
infinity
of dimensions.

His body was tiring. His brain began playing tricks, out of
boredom, with imaginary sounds and imaginary lights. Radu wished for even so
little of reality as the faint crinkle of heavy snowflakes falling.

In the quiet he thought he heard someone calling him.

“Laenea?”

He received no reply.

At the same time, the blizzard thinned for a moment and he
could see the next turning.

He stepped gingerly onto the sixth path, and kept on walking.

It went on so long that he began to believe he had made a
mistake. The indentation in the silver surface of the snow was so faint he
feared he had lost it and was following an illusion. But he had kept careful
watch for another turnoff. He had seen none, and at certain angles the trace
before him was plainly visible. He was a good tracker, when the skill was
required, back on Twilight. The path was there. The snow had piled so deeply
that it slowed his pace and tired him even more rapidly than before. By his own
reckoning, he had been traveling for nearly five hours. He wondered if he had
been gone that long from the pilots’ point of view, and, if he had, if
they could tell. Perhaps he had caused their ship to become lost.

Strangely enough, the prospect bothered Radu very little.

The snow was treacherous. He slipped and fell to his hands
and knees; he struggled to rise, too fast, and slipped again, falling hard and
painfully. Lying flat in the snow, he could hear his heart pounding, faster and
faster. The sound filled his ears and bright lights exploded into darkness
before him. He flung his arms across his eyes, crying out.

Radu made himself be calm. He dragged himself back into
control of his body and he forced himself to remember where he was and what he
was doing. Cautiously lifting his head from his arms, he pushed himself up on
his elbows. He opened his eyes, and saw the next turn: the turn into the
seventh dimension.

He struggled to his feet and looked down at the seventh
path. He did not know how many more of these he could face; what made it worse
was that he did not know how many he might have to face.

The voice called to him again. Despite the snow, the weight
of the silence itself, Laenea’s voice reached him, clear and close.

o0o

Radu sat bolt upright, wide awake, his hands flung out
before him.

He blinked slowly, bringing himself back to the crew room.
Shivering, he slumped against the wall and stared back at the two pilots who
stood in the doorway staring at him.