Superluminal (28 page)

“How could they declare the ship lost? It hasn’t
been here very long. I mean it doesn’t feel like very long. How long
has
it been?” She reached for her mask again; she was not yet proficient at
conserving her breath and speaking in long single sentences, like the more
experienced pilots.

“Your ship is two weeks late, and that’s after
they gave it the maximum for the trip itself.”

She shook her head. “I suppose you understand how hard
it is to keep track of time here.”

“I’ve been told. Repeatedly.”

“I only just sat down to sort things through, and to
try to figure out how to get home,” she said. “I guess I fell
asleep. After Miikala…” Her voice trailed off; she glanced over
Radu’s shoulder. “You couldn’t have come here all by
yourself, surely —?”

“No. I persuaded the pilots to help me. Vasili, and
Ramona-Teresa —”

“Ramona! Is she here? Where?”

“She was with me — in the other room.”

“Oh, no…”

“What is it?”

“Miikala’s in there.”

“I know. I saw… do you see things differently,
here?”

She ignored his question. “Radu, Miikala and Ramona
were lovers, they’ve been lovers since before they were pilots.”
She hurried toward the other room. Radu followed.

Of course, he thought. He felt ashamed, chagrined, and
stupid. All the clues came back to him, now that it was too late to do anything
about them. Until now he had been oblivious to them, and now it was too late.
He had abandoned Ramona to her grief.

She was kneeling beside the couch, staring at Miikala.
Laenea knelt beside her and embraced her. Radu stood helplessly nearby.

“What happened? How did you get here? What did he
mean, experimenting with a novice in the ship? Did he lose hope when you were
lost? Oh,
damn
.”

Laenea held her. Radu, knowing how Ramona felt, how she must
have felt since hearing of the lost ship, wanted to add his comfort to
Laenea’s. His hopes had raised Ramona’s, and now she was betrayed.
He remained where he was, knowing his touch would only hurt her.

“It was only supposed to be a training flight,
that’s true. We went into transit — Oh, Ramona!”

“I know, my dear.” Ramona spoke softly, her eyes
closed, tears heavy on her thick black eyelashes.

“But at the end of the flight, when he said we had to
turn back, it was as if he’d let me sit at the controls of an airplane
but never take off.”

Ramona-Teresa drew back in surprise. “You saw it? You,
Laenea? The first time?”

“I showed him, and then he could see it too. Just like
that. So we went into it, to see what it was like. I saw — I felt
—” She stopped. “I don’t have the right words.
He’d only started to teach me.”

“Even Miikala didn’t have the words for what
you’ve done,” Ramona said. Her voice shook. Her composure finally
shattered. The stolid, independent pilot hid her face against Laenea’s
shoulder, and the younger woman held her, rocking her gently. Radu knew how the
possibility of joy could intensify grief; joy was nothing when one was all
alone.

“He was ecstatic, Ramona,” Laenea said.
“He explained what seventh would mean. We explored it a little way. I
thought he was only getting tired. But then he… he had a seizure. A
stroke. I don’t know. I tried to revive him…” She looked away
from Ramona, at Miikala’s body. “I know he never felt any pain. But
he’d still be alive, if I hadn’t—”

“You don’t know that!” Ramona said
angrily. She dashed the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, and
then she spoke more calmly. “Perhaps it
was
seventh that killed
him, but you aren’t to blame, you — tell yourself this isn’t
a bad place or a bad time for a pilot to die.” She stopped, as her voice
almost broke. “It’s what I’ll be telling myself.”

She started to cry again, and Laenea kept holding her.

“Come away,” Laenea said, “come
away.” She led Ramona from Miikala’s side, back to the control room
and to the pilot’s chair.

“I’m all right,” Ramona said.
“I’ll be all right.” Laenea knelt beside her, holding her
hands.

“Did you get into seventh?”

Radu started. Vasili stood in the shadows of the hatchway,
the sharp planes of his face softened by patterns of light.

“We’re in it, Vasili,” Laenea said,
calmly, gently. “You’re in it all the time.”

“Then where is it, what does it look like?”

“Can’t you see it? It’s all around, once
you’ve perceived it you can’t lose it again.” She glanced at
Radu. “You can see it, Radu, can’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I can.”

“You’re lying,” Vasili said to both of
them. “Anyone can claim a perception and try to get the credit, but
who’ll care if you can’t show it to the rest of us? I don’t
believe you!”

“I’m getting very tired of being called a
liar!” Radu said angrily.

Laenea kept her temper. “Vasili… you brought
exploration equipment, I assume?”

“Yes, of course, we didn’t come out here to get
lost along with you.”

“Good.” Laenea stabbed at a control. The ships
fell out of transit and the universe opened out around them. “Now
look.”

The stars lay spread in strange patterns. Knowing they had
left their galaxy, and must be in some other, made Radu feel a little
frightened.

Laenea gazed quite calmly at space and the stars.

The longer Radu stared, the stranger the stars appeared. He
thought, for a while, that he had lost his ability to project the new images
back on themselves.

Ramona let her breath out in a long sigh. Radu looked more
carefully, and overcame his misperceptions.

Each star — each patch of light, for they were patches
and not points, patches indistinct around the edges where the density of matter
thinned out — each was a single galaxy. And farther away… each of
those bright patches must be a whole galactic cluster.

“Where
are
we?” Vasili whispered.

“We are,” Ramona said, “where you have
wished to come, for so long.”

All of time and space lay beyond the port; the little ships
hung at the end of the universe, billions of light-years, billions of years,
from its origins. Vasili placed his hand flat on the glass. Radu could not tell
if he were reaching for the star clusters, or trying to push them away.

Radu’s gaze met Laenea’s.

“Do you understand?” she said softly.

“Not enough,” he said.

She grinned. “Me, either. Not yet, anyway. But I
will.”

For the first time, for Radu, Laenea
was
a pilot. He
could see the change in her bearing and her manner. Luminous, serene, she
touched Radu’s cheek.

It was, he feared, the last touch between them. Nothing he
had done or seen could overcome the essential disharmony between pilots and
ordinary human beings.

Radu covered Laenea’s hand with his own. He kissed her
palm, then slowly let his hand fall. She gazed at him a moment longer, nodded,
and drew back as Radu, too, stepped away.

Laenea touched a control. The ship silently and smoothly
rotated. The galaxies slid from the viewport.

In the other direction lay… nothing.

Interstellar space is deep black, touched richly with stars.
Even the featureless shadows of hard vacuum could not match the complete
absence of light that faced Radu now. He tried to open out the darkness, to let
images expand to include a future or a past. But there was nothing there, no
stars, no galaxies, no light or heat or radiation. Nothing was there and
nothing ever had been there. He was looking into a place that did not yet exist
and never would exist. The universe, still expanding, would engulf it, and it
never would have been.

The ship continued to turn till the galaxies swept into view
once more. Ramona sat back in the pilot’s chair as if she were exhausted,
and Vasili made an inarticulate sound of confusion, and fury. Radu felt
stunned. Laenea touched another control and neutralized the spin.

“That’s hard to look at for long,” she
said. “Now do you believe me, Vasili? We couldn’t be here, except
by going into seventh.”

“True,” Vasili said with a sort of grim and
self-destructive pleasure. He strode from the control room.

“Why can’t he see it?” Laenea said.
“All you have to do is look.”

“It isn’t that simple,” Ramona said.
“All the pilots can see fourth, but only half of us can perceive fifth,
and half of those, sixth. As for seventh — I had my chance, and Vasili
had his, when Radu brought us here. But we were oblivious to what he sensed,
and to what you understand.”

Radu rubbed his hands over his face, pressing his fingers
against his eyes to shut out, for the moment, the light of the universe past
and present and future. He knew the respite had to be a short one; his
understanding had come more slowly, but no less surely. The implications,
though, would take much longer to discover. He felt very tired.

He steadied himself and let his hands fall to his sides.
Ramona stayed where she was, her shoulders slumped, while Laenea leaned over
her computer, which had interfaced with Vasili’s and the x team’s.
An enormous mass of data scrolled rapidly through the air.

When it finally stopped, Laenea whistled, a low sound of
relief. “Before you came,” she said, “I was afraid I’d
spend the rest of my life trying to get back by successive
approximation.” She faced Radu. “What you must have had to go
through to make them listen — thank you, Radu.”

He looked into her eyes.

It isn’t fair, he thought, we ought to be even closer,
but we aren’t, we can’t be.

His love for her, and his admiration, were as strong as
ever; and the physical attraction was undiminished.

“It wasn’t something I thought about,” he
said. “It wasn’t something I had to decide.”

She smiled.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

Orca woke slowly. At first her vision refused to clear. She
blinked at the fuzzy lights overhead, trying to force them back into focus. She
pushed away the anesthetic mask. The smell of the chemical had already faded,
but she felt like curling up and going back to sleep. She wished she were in
the sea, in a remote harbor, floating and sinking and rising with a pod of
napping killer whales.

Her knees and her back felt stiff and sore. She raised the
lid of her sleep chamber and climbed out, wishing as she seldom had before that
someone were there to help her. She had expected to see Radu. But if something
had gone wrong, if the stress of transit had suddenly caught up with him…

She slipped into her gold mesh vest and padded barefoot out
of the box room.

Radu, hurrying down the corridor, stopped when he saw her.

“You’re okay,” she said with relief.

He nodded.

“Where are we?” Orca said. Her shoulders ached.
She rubbed her collarbone. “It feels like we’ve come a long
way.”

“I’ll show you,” Radu said.

She followed him into the deserted control room. She
stopped, astonished.

Galaxies spread out in clumps and clusters before her,
endless concentrations of stars in hazy spirals, some of them dark red, dying.
The ship had passed beyond any region of single stars.

“A long way,” she said again, very softly.

The implications began to come clear. Orca walked to the
viewport and leaned her forehead against it, cupping her hands around her face
to screen off reflections.

“Turn down the lights, please,” Radu said to the
computer, and it complied. Orca stood in the dark, her hands pressed to the
glass. She felt as if she could dissolve right through it, she
wanted
to
dissolve right through it, to embrace the whole universe with her body and
fling the molecules of her being into the void.

Her vision clouded. She blinked, but the glass had misted
over. Tears ran down her face.

“Orca — don’t, please, we’re not
lost.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “I didn’t mean to
scare you. We aren’t lost.”

“I know,” she said. “I mean, I
wasn’t afraid of that, I wasn’t
afraid
…” She
stopped, unable to explain. “I don’t care…” She held
him, trying to ease his concern, and needing the solidity and touch of another
human being to temper her excitement. Starlight, galaxy-light, gave the only
illumination. It glinted off Radu’s dark blond hair and his high
cheekbones. Orca wished transit ships had more ports, or that they had been
built of some transparent material, so she could bathe in the light of the
universe.

“You must have traveled through seventh,” she
said. “You must have discovered it!”

“Laenea discovered it. I only found her.”

Orca drew away from Radu and turned to the port again. She
looked down, nearly parallel to the ship’s surface. The docking hatch lay
out of sight, but she could see the curve of Laenea’s training ship beyond
the search craft’s flank.

As Radu told her Laenea’s tale, Orca listened in
silence, nodding now and then, hearing and understanding what he said to her,
but increasingly distracted by the sight of the universe.

“Radu,” she said suddenly, “what’s
on the other side?”

He avoided glancing back at the port. “Nothing,”
he said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Darkness — you can’t even call
it that. More than an absence of light. I can’t explain. Laenea would
show it to you. I’m not ready to see it again.” He changed the subject
abruptly. “I’d better fix lunch,” he said, turning away.
“Everybody must be getting hungry.” He spoke as if his pedestrian
duties could erase the extraordinary thing he had done.

“Radu —”

Orca reached toward him. Though she was behind him, out of his
sight, he tensed before she touched him.

She let her hand fall.

“Okay. I’ll see you later.”

He nodded without speaking and walked away.

Orca let him go, all alone, and hoped that was the right
thing to do.