Superluminal (4 page)

Laenea shuddered. “It worked for you, they told me
— but I broke the speaker.”

Miikala laughed with delight. “Causing all other
machines to make frantic noises like frightened little mice.”

“I thought they hadn’t done the operation.
I’ve wanted to be one of you for so long —” Feeling stronger,
Laenea pushed herself up. She left her vest open, glad of the cool air against
her skin.

“We watched,” Miikala said. “We watch you
all, but a few are special. We knew you’d come to us. Do you remember
this one, Ramona?”

“Yes.” She picked up one of the extra glasses,
filled it from a shaker, and handed it to Laenea. “You always fought the
sleep, my dear. Sometimes I thought you might wake.”

“Ahh, Ramona, don’t frighten the child.”

“Frighten her, this tigress?”

Strangely enough, Laenea was not disturbed by the knowledge
that she had been close to waking in transit. She had not, or she would be
dead; she would have died quickly of old age, her body bound to normal time and
normal space, to the relation between time dilation and velocity and distance
by a billion years of evolution, by rhythms planetary, lunar, solar,
biological: subatomic, for all Laenea or anyone else knew. She was freed of all
that now.

She downed half her drink in a single swallow. The air felt
cold against her bare arms and her breasts, so she wrapped her cloak around her
shoulders and waited for the satin to warm against her body.

“When’s your training flight?”

“Not for a whole month.” The time seemed a vast
expanse of emptiness. She had finished the study and the training; now only her
mortal body kept her earthbound.

“They want you completely healed.”

“It’s too long — how can they expect me to
wait until then?”

“For the need.”

“I want to know what happens, I have to find out.
When’s your next flight?”

“Soon,” Ramona-Teresa said.

“Take me with you!”

“No, my dear. It would not be proper.”

“Proper! We have to make our own rules, not follow
theirs. They don’t know what’s right for us.”

Miikala and Ramona-Teresa looked at each other for a long
time. Perhaps pilots could speak together with their eyes and their
expressions, or perhaps Ramona and Miikala simply understood each other in the
way of any ordinary long-time lovers. But they excluded Laenea.

“No.” Ramona’s tone invited no argument.

“At least you can tell me —” She saw at
once that she had said the wrong thing. The pilots’ expressions closed
down in silence. But Laenea felt neither guilt nor contrition, only anger.

“It isn’t because you can’t! You talk
about it to each other, I know that now at least. You can’t tell me you
don’t.”

“No,” Miikala said. “We will not say we
never speak of it.”

“You’re selfish and you’re cruel.”
She stood up, for a moment afraid she might stagger again and have to accept
their help. Ramona and Miikala nodded at each other, with faint, infuriating
smiles. A surge of brittle energy raised Laenea far beyond needing them.

“She has the need,” one of them said, Laenea did
not even know which one. The ringing in her ears cut her off from them. She
turned her back, climbed out of the conversation pit, and stalked away to find
a more congenial spot.

She chose a sitting place nestled into a steep slope very
close to the sea wall. She could feel the ocean’s coolness, as though the
cold radiated, rather than heat. Grotesque creatures floated past in the
spotlights. Laenea curled up and relaxed, making her smooth pulse wax and wane.
If she sat here long enough, would she be able to detect the real tides? Would
the same drifting plant-creatures pass before the window again, swept back and
forth by the forces of sun and moon?

Her privacy was marred only slightly, by one man sleeping or
lying unconscious nearby. She did not recognize him, but he must be crew. His
dark, close-fitting clothes were unremarkably different enough, in design and
fabric, that he might be from another world. He must be new. Earth was the hub
of commerce; no ship flew long without orbiting it. New crew members always
visited earth at least once. New crew usually visited every world their ships
reached at first, even the ones that required quarantine and vaccinations, if
they had enough time. Laenea had done the same herself. The quarantine to
introduce null-strain bacteria, which could not contaminate exotic environments
because it could only reproduce inside the human body, was the most severe and
the most necessary, but no quarantine was pleasant. Laenea, like most other
veterans, eventually remained acclimated to one world, stayed on the ship
during other planetfalls, and arranged her pattern to intersect her home as
frequently as possible.

The sleeping man was several years younger than Laenea. She
thought he must be as tall as she, but that estimation was difficult. He was
one of those uncommon people so beautifully proportioned that from any distance
at all their height can only be determined by comparison. Nothing about him was
exaggerated or attenuated; he gave the impression of strength, but it was the
strength of agility, not violence. Laenea decided he was neither drunk nor
drugged but asleep. His face, though relaxed, showed no dissipation. His hair
was dark blond and shaggy, a shade lighter than his heavy mustache. He was far
from handsome: His features were regular, distinctive, but without beauty.
Below the cheekbones his tanned skin was scarred and pitted, as though from
some virulent childhood disease. Some of the outer worlds had not yet conquered
their epidemics.

Laenea looked away from the new young man. She stared at the
dark water at light’s end, letting her vision double and unfocus. She
touched her collarbone and slid her fingers to the tip of the smooth scar.
Sensation seemed refined across the tissue, as though a wound there would hurt
more sharply. Though Laenea was tired and getting hungry, she did not force
herself to outrun the distractions. For a while her energy should return slowly
and naturally. She had pushed herself far enough for one night.

A month would be an eternity; the wait would seem equivalent
to all the years she had spent crewing. She was still angry at the other
pilots. She felt she had acted like a little puppy, bounding up to them to be
welcomed and patted, then, when they grew bored, they had kicked her away as
though she had piddled on the floor. And she was angry at herself: She felt a
fool, and she felt the need to prove herself.

For the first time she appreciated the destruction of time
during transit. To sleep for a month: convenient, impossible. She first must
deal with her new existence, her new body; then she would deal with a new
environment.

Perhaps she dozed. The deep sea admitted no time: The lights
pierced the same indigo darkness day or night. Time was the least real of all
dimensions to Laenea’s people, and she was free of its dictates, isolated
from its stabilities.

When she opened her eyes again she had no idea how long they
had been closed, a second or an hour.

The time must have been a few minutes, at least, for the
young man who had been sleeping was now sitting up, watching her. His eyes were
dark blue, flecked with black, a color like the sea. For a moment he did not
notice she was awake, then their gazes met and he glanced quickly away,
blushing, embarrassed to be caught staring.

“I stared, too,” Laenea said.

Startled, he turned slowly back, not quite sure Laenea was
speaking to him. “What?”

“When I was a grounder, I stared at crew, and when I
was crew I stared at pilots.”

“I
am
crew,” he said defensively.

“From —?”

“Twilight.”

Laenea had been there, a long while before; images of
Twilight drifted to her. It was a new world, a dark and mysterious place of
high mountains and black, brooding forests, a young world, its peaks just
formed. It was heavily wreathed in clouds that filtered out much of the visible
light but admitted the ultraviolet. Twilight: dusk, on that world. Never dawn.
No one who had ever visited Twilight would think its dimness heralded anything
but night. The people who lived there were strong and solemn, even confronting
disaster. On Twilight she had seen grief, death, loss, but never panic or
despair.

Laenea introduced herself and offered the young man a place
nearer her own. He moved closer, reticent. “I am Radu Dracul,” he
said.

The name touched a faint note in her memory. She followed it
until it grew loud enough to identify. She glanced over Radu Dracul’s
shoulder, as though looking for someone. “Then — where’s
Vlad?”

Radu laughed, changing his somber expression for the first
time. He had good teeth, and deep smile lines that paralleled the drooping
sides of his mustache. “Wherever he is, I hope he stays there.”

They smiled together.

“This is your first tour?”

“Is it so obvious that I’m a novice?”

“You’re alone,” she said. “And you
were sleeping.”

“I don’t know anyone here. I was tired,”
he said, quite reasonably.

“After a while…” Laenea nodded toward a
nearby group of people, hyper and shrill on sleep repressors and energizers.
“You don’t sleep when you’re on the ground if there are
people to talk to, if there are other things to do. You get sick of sleep,
you’re scared of it.”

Radu stared toward the ribald group that stumbled its way
toward the elevator. “Do all of us become like that?”

“Most.”

“The sleeping drugs are bad enough. They’re
necessary — everyone says. But that…” He shook his head
slowly. His forehead was smooth except for two vertical lines that appeared
between his eyebrows when he frowned; it was below his cheekbones, to the
square corner of his jaw, that his skin was scarred.

“No one will force you,” Laenea said. She was
tempted to touch him; she would have liked to stroke his face from temple to
chin, and smooth a lock of hair rumpled by sleep. But he was unlike other
people she had met, whom she could touch and hug and go to bed with on short
acquaintance and mutual whim. Radu had about him something withdrawn and
protected, almost mysterious, an invisible wall that would only be strengthened
by an attempt, however gentle, to broach it. He carried himself, he spoke,
defensively.

“But you think I’ll choose it myself.”

“It doesn’t always happen,” Laenea said,
for she felt he needed reassurance; yet she also felt the need to defend
herself and her former colleagues. “We sleep so much in transit, and
it’s such a dark time, it’s so empty…”

“Empty? Don’t you dream?”

“No, never.”

“I always do,” he said. “Always.”

“I wouldn’t have minded transit time so much if
I’d ever dreamed.”

Understanding drew Radu from his reserve. “I can see
how it might be.”

Laenea thought of all the conversations she had had with all
the other crew she had known. The silent emptiness of their sleep was the
single constant of all their experiences. “I don’t know anyone else
like you. You’re very lucky.”

A tiny luminous fish nosed up against the sea wall. Laenea
reached out and tapped the glass, leading the fish in a simple pattern drawn
with her fingertip.

“I’m hungry,” she said abruptly.
“There’s a good restaurant in the point stabilizer. Will you join
me?”

“A restaurant — where people… buy
food?”

“Yes.”

“I am not hungry.”

He was a poor liar; he hesitated before the denial, and he
did not meet Laenea’s gaze.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He looked at her again, smiling
slightly. That at least was true; he was not worried.

“Are you going to stay here all night?”

“It isn’t night, it’s nearly
morning.”

“A room’s more comfortable — you were
asleep.”

He shrugged; she could see she was making him uneasy. She
realized he must not have any money.

“Didn’t your credit come through?” she
asked. “That happens all the time. I think chimpanzees write the
bookkeeping programs.” She had gone through the red tape and annoyance of
emergency credit several times when her transfers were misplaced or miscoded.
“All you have to do —”

“The administrators made no error in my case.”

Laenea waited for him to explain or not, as he wished.
Suddenly he grinned, amused at himself but not self-deprecating. He looked even
younger than he must be, when he smiled like that. “I’m not used to
using money for anything but… unnecessaries.”

“Luxuries?”

“Yes. Things we don’t often use on Twilight,
things I don’t need. But food, a place to sleep —” He
shrugged again. “They are always freely given, on colonial worlds. When I
got to earth, I forgot to arrange a credit transfer. I know better.” He
was blushing faintly. “I won’t forget again. I miss a meal and one
night’s sleep — I’ve missed more on Twilight, when I was
doing real work. In a few hours I correct my error.”

“There’s no need to go hungry now,” Laenea
said. “You can —”

“I respect your customs,” Radu said. “But
my people prefer not to borrow and we never take what is unwillingly
given.”

Laenea stood up and held out her hand. “I never offer
unwillingly. Come along.”

His hand was warm and hard, like polished wood.

At the top of the elevator shaft, Laenea and Radu stepped
out into the middle of the night. It was foggy and luminous, sky and sea
blending into uniform gray beneath the brilliant moon. No wind revealed the
surface of the sea or the limits of the fog, but the air was cold. Laenea swung
the cloak around them both. A light rain, almost invisible, drifted down,
beading mistily in tiny brilliant drops on the black velvet and on Radu’s
hair. He was silver and gold in the artificial light.

“It’s like Twilight now,” he said.
“It rains like this in the winter.” He stretched out his arm, with
the black velvet draping down like quiescent wings, opened his palm to the
rain, and watched the minuscule droplets touch his fingertips. Laenea could
tell from the yearning in his voice, the wistfulness, that he was painfully, desperately
homesick. She said nothing, for she knew from experience that nothing could be
said to help. The pain faded only with time and fondness for other places.
Earth as yet had given Radu no cause for fondness. But now he stood gazing into
the fog, as though he could see continents, or stars. She slipped her arm
around his shoulders in a gesture of comfort.