Superluminal (33 page)

Ramona waited until the uproar quieted. The sea breeze
ruffled her roan hair. Radu breathed the fresh air gratefully. He felt as if he
had not taken a deep breath since Ngthummulun.

The older pilot’s voice carried, strong and clear.

“I know some of you,” she said. “Too often
when we speak together it is because of tragedy. A friend has died, but his
death was a natural one, and the sorrow should remain private. I want to speak
to you instead of joy and discovery. The joy and the discovery are
public.” She drew Laenea forward to stand beside her. “Laenea
Trevelyan has done what the pilots have hoped to do since there
were
pilots. On her first training flight, she discovered the transit dimension
which will open the universe beyond our galaxy.”

Silence dissolved in another rush of questions. Laenea and
Ramona answered. Laenea’s discovery overshadowed the story of the lost
ship that everyone had come to hear. Perhaps they assumed the discovery
explained why Miikala’s ship stayed out so long. At any rate no one asked
Radu anything. He wondered if Ramona-Teresa, understanding that Laenea was a
hero while Radu was a freak, had planned it this way. He suspected that she
had, and he was most grateful to her.

He admired her for her control of the crowd of reporters,
gawkers, and passers-by. The force of her personality charmed them, much more
than her status as one of the first pilots. She would have had the same effect
on them if she were merely a politician or a street-corner haranguer. Though
every word she spoke to them was the truth, she could easily have lied. They
would have believed her.

Suddenly, Orca bolted past Radu and down the stairs.

“Orca!” Ramona shouted.

If Radu were to escape, even only long enough to tell Orca
what he feared, now was the time —

At that moment Laenea plunged back into the shuttle,
fighting for breath. She flung out her hands when Radu came toward her, roughly
shrugging off his help.

“I’m all right,” she said, her voice short
and rough. “Just — don’t — touch me.”

Radu obeyed, unwillingly. Laenea bent down, breathing hard.

“Vasili Nikolaievich!” Radu cried. “Come
help Laenea, hurry, please!”

To Radu’s surprise, the young pilot, his expression
and his posture as sulky as ever, appeared a moment later. He put one arm
around Laenea’s shoulders.

“You can’t do anything for her anymore,”
he said. “It’s other pilots she needs, now.” He led her
farther into the shuttle. Radu watched them go, wanting to do something,
knowing he was helpless.

Ramona-Teresa joined him a moment later.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. We… can’t even bear
each other’s touch anymore.” He hesitated, then said, unwillingly,
“You were right all along.”

“Perhaps,” she said, sounding distracted, and
followed the others into the shuttle.

Radu was alone. He could not see where Orca had gone. The
crowd had begun to disperse.

This might be the only chance he would get. With one last
wistful glance after Laenea, Radu stepped out of the shuttle, hurried down the
ladder, and lost himself among the spectators.

o0o

Constant, painful, beautiful dreams of outside filled
Marc’s fugue state. When he recovered and reoriented himself in time and
space, he knew he could not continue as he was. His pretty things no longer
sufficed. They never had, though he had succeeded in distracting himself with
them for years.

Exhausted, emaciated, and safe for a time from another
attack, he came to himself again, and knew that he must change.

He fixed himself tea and broth and settled in to catch up on
what had happened while he was gone.

Marc’s analogue had culled the messages from his
informants, his news traces, and his database infiltrations. Marc’s
sources of information were, as Radu Dracul had said, excellent. Radu’s
problem was one to which he would have to set himself immediately. The analogue
began the report on Laenea and Radu with reassurances: “Laenea is found
again, but… ” and ended with a very human-sounding complaint that
Marc had not troubled to mention Radu. Intrigued, Marc read the report.

The day after receiving Marc’s cautions, the young
offworlder had shipped out, with not one but two pilots — so much for
taking Marc’s advice — and with a crew member who was also a diver.
Marc had wished to meet Orca for some time. He prized unique people even over
unique things.

Marc had, over the years, acquired the habit of letting his
attention wander. It passed the time more quickly than most activities, and
often showed him connections he would not otherwise have seen. Now he reminded
himself that time, which had not mattered to him for so long, mattered once
more. He concentrated on the report.

Laenea’s ship, declared lost, had returned in the company
of the craft that had taken Radu Dracul back into transit. Both ships had
docked at Earthstation, and an unscheduled shuttle now sailed back toward
earth. It would soon land on the Northwest port. Anyone with both access to a
radar trace and any intuition, common sense, or curiosity could guess that the
shuttle carried the people who had been on Laenea’s ship and on the
rescue craft.

It should be very interesting up on deck.

Marc turned off his news collation, stood, and brushed his
fingertips across the controls of the door between his chambers and the
outside.

It was time for his exile to end.

Marc left his rooms, walked down the corridor, boarded the
elevator, rode it to the surface, and stepped out on deck for the first time in
many years. Everything he was doing, he was doing for the first time in many
years. He dared not let himself react with much intensity.

He walked slowly toward the shuttle and the mass of people
around it. He supported himself on his favorite stick, a long polished limb with
a heavy growth of textured vine entwined around its length. Though he did not
feel lame just now, he was shaky and agoraphobic, severely affected by the
unaccustomed noise, the tumult, and the enormous space around him. His eyes
were not used to focusing at such distances.

The air, though, the air: He had forgotten how fresh and
good the air smelled out here on deck, even among the machines with their tang
of fuel and lubricants and ozone.

The blockhouse lay like a silent island in a pool of
illumination. The shuttle formed a promontory above a sea of people, lights,
and shadows. Marc hobbled through the empty darkness separating them. He heard
Ramona’s calm, certain voice, though he had not made out the question to
which she was responding.

Laenea stood beside her, Radu Dracul a little behind them.
Marc allowed himself a smile, but tried to check the joy he felt at seeing
Laenea alive. Marc thought himself safe from a fit — the malfunctioning
nerve cells seemed to require a period of recovery between episodes of
misbehavior — but he preferred to minimize the risk by remaining calm.

He paused before he reached the edge of the crowd, reluctant
to test himself against such a concentration of people. He glanced around,
neither hoping for a break in the crush nor finding one. Only a single other
person haunted the edge, as he did: a very young man, a boy, who might have
been as old as fifteen. He was completely naked. He gazed up at the shuttle.
Droplets of water glistened on his sleek body. His skin was the color of
mahogany, and his hair, damp and plastered against his head, was so blond it
looked like a silver helmet. He moved forward, his step hesitant. Light glowed
through the tan pink webs of his hands.

A diver, Marc thought.

In the middle of answering a question, Laenea suddenly
stopped, stepped back as if from a blow, turned, and vanished into the shuttle.
Amid the murmur of surprise from the crowd, Ramona picked up the reply in
midphrase.

Knowing how severely Laenea reacted to ordinaries, Marc
pushed forward, trying to get to the stairs. But that was the aim of everyone
else, too, and he immediately realized how foolish was his attempt. He found
himself crushed between a tall reporter and a short massive camera operator. He
tried to back up, too late. He lost his walking stick. He stumbled; he felt
himself going down as if he were diving into a warm salty sea. The reporter
tried to help him, but the current pulled her away. Someone else bumped him and
he fell.

He was dragged across the deck; the sound of shoes and boots
on metal overwhelmed even voices. The trembling began deep inside his body, and
he curled himself up, thinking only, It can’t take me again, not so soon,
not here among all these people.

Then he was dragged free, and the footsteps and voices receded.
He lay on the deck, his arms around his head and his face hidden against his
knees for protection. He peered out cautiously.

The blond dark boy, the naked diver, knelt motionless
nearby, his hands, relaxed with webs and fingers spread, resting on his thighs.
Marc had never read that divers had eyes any larger than the average, but the
young man’s extraordinary black eyes were enormous.

Marc unfolded his long, gaunt body and sat up slowly,
grateful for the cold sea breeze. He shivered, but the sensation was different
altogether from the trembling that warned of a fugue.

“Are you injured?” the diver asked. “I
thought they’d crushed you, when you fell.”

“Say I was knocked down, at least,” the older
man said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be churlish. Thank you
for helping me. Do you see my stick?”

The young diver glanced around, then got up and retrieved
the cane, kicked aside at the edge of a spotlight’s shallow puddle of
illumination. He brought it back to Marc.

“Are you a pilot?” he asked.

Marc touched the scars on his chest: two scars, not one,
parallel to each other and close together, both scars old and faded to white.

“No,” he said. “Not anymore. Are you a
diver?”

“Yes. My name is… Mark Harris.”

Marc smiled and extended his hand. “We should get
along well, then. My name is Marc, too.”

o0o

Orca used her strength and her small size to get through the
crowd, bulling her way past people, slipping between them, till she reached
open space.

Her brother had freed himself and now knelt beside an older
man, a grounder who, by the look of him, had come to some grief in the crowd.

Orca spoke her brother’s underwater name. In the air
the long descriptive phonemic string came out a high-pitched garble, but he
recognized it and spoke her name in reply.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I heard what happened. I was afraid for you.”

She had never thought to see him in the human world, and so
close to so many landers. He was wary of them, yet he had come to help her
without so much as a knife belt. Touched, she knelt and hugged him. He put his
arms around her and nuzzled the hollow of her collarbone.

“I missed you,” he said softly, and drew away
again. Orca squeezed his hand and let him go.

She heard the high-pitched descending whistle of a killer
whale’s greeting. She answered as well as she could, but did not try to
explain where she had been or what had happened. It would be difficult
underwater; in the air she could not even make a start at it.

A half dozen port security officers came out of the
blockhouse. They paused to assess the crowd and to curse, though rather
good-naturedly, at the thought of trying to break it up without offending
tourists or earning the wrath of reporters. Ramona had vanished inside the
shuttle, so the spectators at the edge of the group were drifting away. The air
of expectancy was fading. A network helicopter took off with its news crew;
farther away, another information corporation’s microjet powered up with
a sighing whine.

“This is my sister Orca,” her brother said to
the older man.

“How do you do,” he said to her. “My name
is also Marc.”

She did not have a chance to wonder what he meant by
“also,” for he was trying to rise. He got to his knees and steadied
himself with his stick; Orca helped him with a hand under his elbow.

The spot of warmth behind Orca’s eyes became tinged
with red; she let the emergency message through.

This is van de Graaf. Where are you?

Right outside, Orca replied. If you look you can see me.

Is Radu with you?

No.

You should have stayed here. Now stay there. If you see him,
keep him there, too. The rest of us will be out in a minute.

Without replying, Orca ceased to accept the transmission.
Though the crowd had thinned it would be longer than a minute before anyone
— any pilots, at least — got through it from the shuttle. Orca
looked around for Radu, but did not see him.

She heard her cousins calling for her to return to the sea,
welcoming her, curious as always about what she had done during her absence in
the air.

“Go ahead,” her brother said. “I’ll
stay here.”

“Wait —” Marc said.

Orca kicked off her shoes and her pants. “I’ll
be right back,” she called, throwing off her vest and running for the
edge of the port.

She dove. The sea closed in over her with an energizing
shock. Air bubbles tickled past her body. She let her momentum carry her
straight down, then swam even deeper. The conversations of her cousins showed
her where they were. She was inside the delicate webbing of a three-dimensional
sound net. Fifty meters underwater she arched her body and circled upward again.

Her metabolism accelerated to the higher rate. When she
broke the surface she took a deep breath and felt the oxygen burning in her
lungs. She dove again, humming to her cousins. Their dark shapes surrounded
her. They brushed her with their bodies, their fins, their flukes, more gently
than any human lover.

I’m glad you decided to come to the gathering, her
closest cousin said.