Superluminal (35 page)

“No,” Mark said.

But Marc kept his silence until he could find out what she
wanted with the young offworlder. For the moment Marc felt glad that Kri did
not quite trust him; it saved him from the guilt of not quite trusting her.

Van de Graaf’s irritation increased the longer Orca
remained in the sea. Most of the crowd had gone home, and it would be quite
safe for the pilots to come out of the shuttle.

A young woman stepped out of the blockhouse, hurried across
the deck, and handed a stack of folded material to Dr. van de Graaf.

“Thank you,” the doctor said, handing it on to
Mark. Mark looked curiously at what van de Graaf had given him.

“Thank you,” he said. “What is it?”

“Clothes. They’ll fit, or close enough.”

“You want me to put these on?”

“If you plan to stay here long,” she said,
“other people will be a great deal more comfortable if you do.”

Mark shrugged, put the folded garments on the deck, and
picked up the one on top. He shook it out. It was an ordinary cotton T-shirt.

“The tag goes inside and at the back of the
neck,” Marc said.

“Where’s the neck?”

“Here.” He showed him.

“That’s a hole.”

“It goes around your neck.”

He would have ended up with the shirt wrapped around his
throat like a scarf, so Marc took it from him and helped him into it as if he
were a child. For all the familiarity he had with clothes, he might as well
have been. They repeated the process with a pair of stiff new blue jeans.

The jeans were too tight around Mark’s muscular thighs
and too loose around his waist. He looked as if he were not so much wearing the
clothes as existing inside them.

“That’s the best I can do for now,” van de
Graaf said. “If we go shopping, we might miss Orca.”

o0o

Every time Orca surfaced, the point of warmth behind her
eyes, the message signal, had gained another level of urgency. It rose through
the spectrum from dull red to yellow to blue to incandescent white. She knew
that when she answered it she would be ordered back on deck, but when she
finally chose to return it was — if it was anything in addition to her
own desire — more because her cousins wanted to learn from her than
because of what the administrators wanted.

Orca dove one last time, cutting through the water beneath
her closest cousin, spinning over, and sliding her hands along the
whale’s smooth flanks as she passed her. She surfaced beside the port.
She and her cousin called her brother, in harmony, then the killer whale
slapped her tail against the water, sounded, and returned to the pod.

A line snaked down the side of the port. Orca climbed hand
over hand to the deck.

Her brother reached down. She grabbed his hand and swung
herself up. As soon as she came over the edge of the platform and Dr. van de
Graaf saw her, the emergency message signal faded, leaving only the normal
point of warmth that signaled regular mail. Mostly junk, no doubt, as usual.

The crowd had dispersed. The shuttle stood silent and dark
on the runway. Orca had stayed out longer than she meant to, but she felt
wonderful. She was full of joy and disbelief at what her cousin had urged.

Orca looked at her brother, astonished. “What’s
this?” she said, touching the front of his T-shirt.

“Well…” he said. He shrugged.
“Clothes, I guess.”

Orca shook the water from her hair. She put her arm around
her brother and they walked back to where Marc sat on one of the benches scattered
here and there beside the walkway. Dr. van de Graaf stood nearby, looking
impatient.

“About time you deigned to come back,” she said.
Orca did not bother to answer.

“I envy your freedom,” Marc said.

Orca’s clothes lay in a neat stack on the end of the
bench beside Marc. She felt too warm to put them on yet. She sat crosslegged
near him.

“Who
are
you?” Orca said.

“I told you.”

“You told me your name, that’s all.”

“I’m a friend of Laenea’s.”

Orca heard voices and glanced at the shuttle. The three pilots
came down the stairs. Radu was nowhere to be seen.

“Where did Radu go?” Orca asked.

“That’s what we’ve been wondering,”
van de Graaf said. “Where did
you
go? I told you to stay here.
We’ve been waiting for you to come back for over an hour.”

“I didn’t realize I’d been out that
long,” Orca said without apology.

Van de Graaf’s expression remained cool, but she
scooped up Orca’s clothes and tossed them to her with a quick and angry
snap of the wrist. Orca plucked them easily out of the air. She doubted that
van de Graaf believed she had no idea where Radu had gone.

Despite her calm, the doctor obviously felt angry at Orca
for disobeying orders. Pilots could get away with disobeying representatives of
the administrators, but it was not a prudent thing for a crew member to do. A
week ago that would have worried the diver, but now she felt that no one,
administrator or otherwise, could threaten her.

“This is Laenea, and Ramona-Teresa, and Vasili
Nikolaievich,” Orca said to her brother, nodding to each pilot in turn.
“I guess you’ve met Dr. van de Graaf.” There was an awkward
silence in which Orca should have introduced her brother by name, but did not.
She could not. “This is my brother,” she said.

Then, to her surprise, her brother said, “You can call
me Mark Harris.”

Startled, surprised, and delighted, Orca laughed.

“What’s so funny?” van de Graaf said.

“Never mind,” Orca said. “It’s too
complicated to explain.”

She started putting on her clothes.

Laenea glanced at Marc. Orca thought they must not be as
good friends as the older man had implied, for Laenea’s expression held
more curiosity than recognition. The pilot frowned slightly, took one step
toward him, and stopped.

“Marc… ?” she said doubtfully.

He pushed himself up, clasping both hands around the top of
his stick to lever himself to his feet.

“Yes,” he said.

“But how —? Why —?”

“It seemed like the right
time,” he said.

He extended one hand. Without hesitation she clasped his
wrist tightly. They embraced, more like crew members than a pilot and…
Orca could not make herself think of Marc as an ordinary, a grounder, but she
had no idea at all how she should think of him.

“How did you recognize me?” Marc asked.

“I don’t know. I’m changed,” Laenea
said, “from what I was before.”

He smiled at her. “I would imagine so.”

Orca finished tying the laces of her shoes.

“Are you ready?” Van de Graaf’s impatience
crackled like static electricity.

“Yes,” Orca said.

“It was good of the two of you to welcome your friends
home,” the doctor said, “but we’ll have to leave you now.”

“I’m coming with you,” Orca’s
brother said.

“Are you sure?” Orca said.

He nodded. “If you’re not coming home.”

Now that her brother wanted to enter the human world, Orca
suddenly felt afraid for him. She wished he had stayed in the sea. He was too
much like the cousins to get along well here. To survive, he would have to
learn things that he would never need to know, in his real life.

Still, he
had
chosen the perfect surface name.
Perhaps he would get along up here after all.

“It’s impossible,” van de Graaf said.
“We’re going to the administration deck. Your brother will have to
stay out here.”

“If he stays, I stay,” Orca said.

“Out of the question.”

“Surely not, Kri,” Ramona said. “If it
will make Orca more comfortable for her brother to join us, why forbid
it?”

Van de Graaf sighed. “All right. He can come.”
Her eyelids flickered as she communicated with someone or something. Orca
tried, rudely, to listen in, but could not break into the frequency. The doctor
returned and glanced at Marc. “I suppose you want to come along, too,
Marc?”

“That is true.”

“Oh, what the hell,” van de Graaf said, with the
exasperation of someone unused to anything less than total control. “Does
anyone
have any idea where Radu Dracul might have gone?”

“You saw him the last time I did,” Laenea said.

Van de Graaf glanced at Ramona, asking the same question
with her silence.

“He went past me and down the ladder. I thought he was
trying to help Orca.”

“Obviously not,” van de Graaf said. “Is
there anyone else he might have contacted?”

“As far as I know, everyone on earth that he’s
acquainted with is right here,” Laenea said. Then, a moment later,
“Except…”

“Who?”

“He only met her once, for a few minutes, at a
party.”

“
Who?
”

“Kathell Stafford. Do you know her?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” She stroked the outer
curve of her eyebrow thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” she said.
“Let’s go.”

The group made its way toward the stabilizer shaft. Marc
joined the pilots, who kept their distance from the divers. Dr. van de Graaf
walked by herself.

“I like your name,” Orca said softly to her
brother.

“I thought it might be awkward for them if I
didn’t have one,” Mark said.

“It would have made them uncomfortable — but
they often feel like that anyway. They get over it.”

Mark fidgeted inside his new clothes.

“You wear this stuff all the time,” he said.

“When I’m around landers,” Orca said.
“But when I wear jeans, I leave them in a tide pool in the sun for about
a week and then wash them before I ever put them on.”

“Do you have to stay here?” he said quietly.

“I have to be sure a friend of mine is okay.”
She was worried about Radu. Whatever it was he had discovered must have
troubled him deeply, to make him disappear so suddenly and completely.

“I mean, would you be able to leave if you
wanted?”

“That’s a good question,” Orca said. It
surprised her that Mark would ask it, and made her think again that perhaps he
could get along in the human world. “I’m not sure I want to. I told
the cousins what happened to me out there, and they understood. They want to
know more — they want me to go back.”

Mark looked at her curiously. “Really? Tell me what
happened, too.”

“I can’t. Not up here, it’s impossible. As
soon as we swim, I will.”

“All right.” He walked beside her in silence, in
patience.

Orca doubted she would be able to use her internal
communicator once she was inside the administration deck, so she quickly
explored several record indices. She found no trace of Radu. Orca doubted he
would forget the lesson she had taught him. He would leave as little trail as
if he were moving through the forest on his own home world.

They approached the blockhouse. An elevator cage, doors
open, waited for them.

Orca still felt flushed and warm from the metabolic rush
brought on by her swim, but the effect was fading. She would be glad to get out
of the wind.

Then the obvious thing occurred to her. She accepted her
ordinary mail and scanned the messages quickly.

Among the junk mail was an unsigned note.

I accept your offer, it said, and that was all.

Damn
, she thought. It’s the wrong time, the
wrong way for all this to work out…

But maybe the only way, for Radu.

Orca grabbed Mark’s hand.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

Without hesitation, without question or surprise, he turned
with her and they ran toward the edge of the port. Orca heard van de Graaf
curse, startled and irritated; Ramona-Teresa called her name, and Mark’s.

They dove together and sank beneath the waves. Several
meters down they swam close together and undressed each other, having trouble
and laughing over Mark’s stiff new jeans. They abandoned the clothes by
the edge of the port and swam away to join their cousins.

Though no one in the group believed that Orca and her
brother had gone for a quick swim, they waited a few minutes, till van de Graaf
said, “Divers!” in disgust, and led everyone into the elevator. The
doors closed and it slid downward. It stopped at a floor that Laenea had tried
to visit a number of times, out of curiosity. The elevator controls always
before had refused to acknowledge the request.

The carpet in the foyer was deep and springy; the room van
de Graaf led them to exceeded the VIP shuttle in luxury.

The administrators do treat themselves well, Laenea thought.

“The bar’s over there,” van de Graaf said,
sat in a chair in a corner, closed her eyes, and went immediately into a
communications trance.

“I suppose she thinks all we do when we’re not
flying is get drunk,” Vasili said, and flung himself into a chair, where
he sat sullenly with his arms crossed.

Ignoring him, Ramona-Teresa poured herself a straight shot
of scotch and drank it. Marc found a bottle of tequila at the very back of a
shelf. Laenea decided that a drink of cognac was not a bad idea.

I might have expected that Vasili doesn’t drink,
Laenea thought. Ah, well, he ought to be happy; at least it gives him something
to sulk about.

Laenea was on her second drink and Ramona-Teresa on her
fourth when van de Graaf returned.

“Radu has simply disappeared,” she said.
“There’s no credit or transportation trace, and Stafford claimed
she hadn’t seen him since he was with you. I had to remind her
she’d ever met him.”

“It was a far-fetched idea,” Laenea said.
“They barely met.” Still, she thought, it was not like Kathell to
forget anyone.

“Maybe. But she wasn’t speaking to me directly;
she used a remote. She could have been lying.”

“You were monitoring her!” Ramona-Teresa said.

Van de Graaf shrugged.

“I don’t think you need to be so anxious about
Radu,” Laenea said quickly. “He’s done this before, gone off
alone. He just wants time to think. He’ll be back.”