Superluminal (40 page)

“I have… sources of information that
aren’t easily accessible to the administrators.”

“But why did you come? What are you doing out of your
home? Marc, you look exhausted.”

“I know what you’re afraid the pilots want to
do. Radu, I understand why you’re afraid, but I came to ask you, to beg
you, at least give them a chance. I know there’s a danger, but I promise
they aren’t evil people. They would not act as recklessly as you fear —”
He spoke all in a rush, desperately; he stopped only when he ran out of breath.

“Why you, Marc? Why did you risk coming here?”

Marc avoided his gaze. “I tried to help…”
He stopped. He looked up. The pupils of his pale gray eyes were very large, for
such a bright morning. “That’s true, but it isn’t the whole
truth. I told you that you could trust me, and I won’t betray your trust
now. If they learn what they hope to, I might fly again. I’m here out of
selfishness. I want to go back into transit.”

“And the memories you’ll lose? What about
them?”

“I’ll have to relearn them, I suppose, along
with everything else. My analogue will tell me.”

“That would be worth it to you?”

“If I could change enough to fly again, yes, it would be
worth it.” He leaned forward, reaching out in supplication.
“Please, Radu.”

Radu took Marc’s cool, frail hand and gripped it
gently.

“You will come back?” Marc said.

“Yes.” He would let the administrators and the
pilots make their demands of him, and he would have a few demands to make of
them in turn.

Marc sagged forward. Radu steadied him and helped him sit in
a grassy shade-swept spot beneath a wind-gnarled evergreen.

“I’ve overtired myself,” he whispered,
staring at his hands hanging limp between his knees.

“I don’t doubt it,” Radu said. “Lie
down. Sleep for a while.”

Then he remembered that those were the same words Marc had
used just before shutting himself away in his rooms, just before his last
illness.

“I seldom sleep,” Marc whispered, lying back on
the grass.

“What should I do, Marc?” Radu said.

“Nothing,” Marc said. His voice became still and
breathless. “I’m sorry to expose you to this…”

Radu wished he had put on his jacket so he could at least
wrap it around Marc’s shoulders.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“I…” Marc’s voice failed him and he
closed his eyes.

His whole body stiffened, then began to quiver. His eyelids
flickered and he muttered a few words. The quivering continued for ten minutes,
then stopped, and Marc’s body relaxed again.

Radu waited another ten minutes, expecting the fit to start
any moment, until the movements of Marc’s closed eyes showed that he was
deeply asleep and dreaming.

Radu felt pity and understanding. It was not Marc’s
illness that had kept him so isolated for so long. It was — as he himself
had said, back at the spaceport — his pride.

Radu heard footsteps on the trail.

Orca climbed to the crest of the island. She saw the ultra-
light, and Radu with someone lying beside him, and ran toward them.

Radu put his finger to his lips. “He’s
sleeping,” he said quietly.

She saw that it was Marc, let her apprehension go, and sat
crosslegged beside Radu.

“Good morning.”

He leaned over and kissed her.

“It is indeed,” he said. “I came up here
to watch it, and look what it brought me.”

“He used to be a pilot, didn’t he?”

“Yes. And hopes to be one again.”

“So he did come to take you back.”

“To ask me to come.”

“And?”

“I’m going to go.”

“What about the blue?”

“I want to be able to talk to her, Orca. I want to be
able to tell her the name you gave me, and find out what the rest of my name
is. I need to learn true speech. While I’m doing that… I’ll
trade my time to the administrators, if they will cancel Twilight’s debt.
Then the pilots can try to learn… whatever they think they can learn from
me.”

“Can you trust them?”

“In general? Who knows? They’re people like the
rest of us, not ordinary, perhaps, but people all the same. Van de Graaf?
Vasili?” He laughed. “I doubt it. But I can trust Laenea, I think I
can even trust Ramona-Teresa. As for Marc… Marc is too honorable to lie,
even for his own benefit.” Radu put his hands gently on Orca’s bare
shoulders. “And you. I should have trusted you much sooner.”

Orca gripped his forearms.

“Last night,” she said, “I saw that
you’d found your place, if you wanted it. Are you sure you want to
go?”

“Do you remember what you said when I told you how
worried Atna was for us?”

“Of course.”

“Resonances make sense to me now,” he said.
“Mine come back here, and here they stay, but for a little while longer
they blend with those of the pilots. And with yours.”

“I’m glad of that.”

They hugged each other, like crew members saying goodbye,
like friends saying hello.

The Moon and the Sun

Dreamsnake

Superluminal

The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

Starfarers
(Starfarers, Book 1)

Transition
(Starfarers, Book 2)

Metaphase
(Starfarers, Book 3)

Nautilus
(Starfarers, Book 4)

The Exile Waiting

Barbary
(SF for younger readers)

Short Fiction

Outcasts: Three Stories

Little Faces
, Nebula-nominated novelet

The Adventure of the Field Theorems, a Sherlock Holmes Scientific Romance

Supreme Court of the United States Defines Personhood
(flash fiction)

Superluminal

Vonda N. McIntyre

Book View Café Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-1-61138-083-5
Copyright © 1983 Vonda N. McIntyre

First published: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983

Chapters 1-3 (in slightly different form) published as
“Aztecs” in
2076: The American Tricentennial,
ed. Edward Bryant, Pyramid Books,1977.

“Transit,” an excerpt, published in
Isaac
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
October 1983.

Cover illustration: courtesy NASA

Cover design: Sue Lange

Starfarers
excerpt copyright © 1989 Vonda N. McIntyre

v20120601vnm

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Starfarers

Vonda N. McIntyre

Book One of The Starfarers Quartet

Starfarers
Transition
Metaphase
Nautilus

Book View Café eBook Edition
December 2009
ISBN: 978-1-61138-092-7
Copyright © 1989 Vonda N. McIntyre

Nervous and excited and rushed and late, J.D. Sauvage
hurried down the corridor of the terminal. The satchel carrying her personal
allowance thumped against her hip. The other passengers had already begun to
board the spaceplane.

“J.D.!”

Victoria Fraser MacKenzie strode toward her. J.D. was aware
of the attention of the other people in the waiting area, surely recognizing
Victoria, perhaps also wondering who the heavyset, sunburned newcomer might be.
Victoria was the sort of person one noticed. Though she was small and compact,
she had a powerful presence. Everything about her was intense: her energy, her
eyes, the black of her hair, her passionate defense of the deep space
expedition. She had been much in the news lately.

She extended her hand. J.D. took it. The contrast of
Victoria’s hand, dark and smooth, the nails well-groomed, to her own, the skin
roughened by exposure to wind and sea, the nails pared down as short as they
could get, made J.D. wish she had had more time to prepare for this trip.

“I’m glad to see you,” Victoria said.

“Were you afraid I’d changed my mind again?”

“No. Not once you agreed. J.D.... I know how important your
research is to you. But the expedition is unique. The orcas will still be here
when we get back. The divers, too.”

I hope so, J.D. thought, but she did not say it aloud.

“Come on,” Victoria said. “We’d better hurry.”

They walked into the entry tunnel and joined the end of the
line.

“This is your first trip up, eh?” Victoria said. “Is there
anything you want to know that they didn’t cover at the orientation?”

“Um... I missed the orientation.”

“You
missed
it?”

“I was down at cargo. It took longer than I expected.”

“Was there a problem?”

“They didn’t want to load my equipment.”

“Whyever not?”

“Because it didn’t look like equipment to them. They tried
to redefine it as personal and make me take only what I could fit in my
allowance.”

“What kind of equipment is it?”

“Information, mostly.”

“Why didn’t you put it on the web? Arachne can always give
it back to you.”

“Most of it is books, and most of the books I have aren’t in
any databases.”