Superluminal (41 page)

“You could have had them scanned.”

“Some of them are unique, though, and they get so beat up
when you send them out for scanning. I didn’t have time to do it myself.”

“What kind of books are you talking about?”

“Old ones. You won’t understand until you see them.”

“How many did you bring?”

“Three hundred fifty seven kilos.”

“Good lord.”

“That isn’t really very much, when you’re talking about
books.”

“And it isn’t half what any experimental physicist would
bring. As for a geneticist — ” Victoria laughed. “Considering all the stuff
Stephen Thomas brought, you’d think he was singlehandedly in charge of
diversity and cloning.”

“Is he?”

“No, that’s his boss, Professor Thanthavong.”

“I’m really looking forward to meeting her,” J.D. said. “Do
you think I’ll get a chance to?”

“Sure. She’s not standoffish at all. The more you can forget
she’s famous, the better you’ll get along with her, eh? Anyway, Stephen Thomas
still does some bioelectronics, though that’s pretty much been taken over by
the developers. He’s branched out into theories of non-nucleic-acid
inheritance. Exogenetics. One of our celebrated ‘nonexistent’ disciplines. The
equipment he needs is pretty standard lab stuff, but when he came up, he
brought a lot of extraneous things.”

“How did he talk it all through cargo?”

Victoria made a strange little motion of her shoulders, a
gesture of amused disbelief. J.D. wondered why she did not simply shake her
head. Maybe it had something to do with her being Canadian. J.D. had studied a
number of different cultures, but had never looked past the superficial
resemblance of Canadian culture to the majority culture of the U.S. She decided
not to admit that to Victoria.

“If you ask Arachne for the definition of ‘charm,’“ Victoria
said, “it gives you back a picture of Stephen Thomas Gregory.”

J.D. followed Victoria to their places. Victoria helped her
transfer her allowance into a string bag, then showed her how to strap in against
the upright lounge. It held her in a position with her hips and knees slightly
flexed.

“Where are the controls for this thing?” J.D. looked for the
way to turn the lounge into a chair. “How do you sit down?”

“You don’t,” Victoria said. “It takes a lot of energy to
keep your body in a sitting position in microgravity. It’s much easier to lie
nearly flat. Or stand, depending on how you look at it.”

J.D. thought about how it would feel to sit and stand and
lie stretched out in space, comparing it to her diving experience.

“Okay,” she said. “I see. That makes sense.” She grasped the
armrests. Fright tinged her excitement, not unpleasantly. Her fingers trembled.
Victoria noticed her nervousness and patted her hand. The sound patterns
changed as the space plane readied itself for takeoff. J.D. would have sworn
that like a bird or a dolphin she could feel the increase in the magnetic
field, the shift and slide of it as it oriented itself to thrust the spaceplane
down the long rails. Of course that was absurd.

Victoria finished transferring her own allowance from the
carrier to the compartment. She had several acceleration-resistant packages,
but most of her allowance consisted of fancy clothes, similar to what she was
wearing.

“Victoria,” J.D. said hesitantly, “do people dress, um, more
formally on board than they would back here?”

Victoria was wearing an embroidered shirt and wide suede
trousers caught at her ankles with feathered ties.

“Hmm?” Victoria closed the compartment and gave J.D.’s
satchel to the artificial stupid waiting to take them off the plane. Getting
out of Earth’s gravity well was too expensive to spend the acceleration on
suitcases. The AS buzzed away.

“I couldn’t help but notice what you’re wearing. I didn’t
bring anything like that, if that’s what’s called for on the ship.”

Victoria glanced at her, then chuckled. J.D. shifted
uncomfortably. She had thrown away most of her beat-up old clothes, and ordered
new ones that she packed without trying on. She had not had time to consider
buying anything formal.

“I’m not laughing at you,” Victoria said quickly. “Just
imagining going to the lab in this outfit. We’re pretty casual on campus. But
sometimes I get tired of casual. I always fill up the extra corners of my
personal allowance with silly clothes. You can get necessities back home. It’s
the things you can do without that you start to miss.”

“I see,” J.D. said, relieved.

“Don’t worry, you’ll fit right in. There’s no dress code,
and the environment is moderate. Too moderate, I think. We don’t have weather,
we have climate. I wouldn’t mind some snow, or a thunderstorm. Satoshi thinks
it’s too cold, but he’s spoiled — he grew up in Hawaii.”

Victoria leaned against her couch and fastened the straps. “I’m
ready,” she said. “So let’s get going.”

“I should tell you something,” J.D. said.

“Oh?”

The careful neutrality in Victoria’s tone told J.D. that her
own original decision — to turn down the invitation to join
Starfarer
’s alien contact department — had had an
effect that would take time to overcome.

“I resigned from the Department of State,” J.D. said. “And
turned back my grant.”

“Did you? I’m glad. I’m sorry I snapped at you about having
such close ties to your government. But these days you never know when they
might slap ‘classified’ all over your research.” Suddenly Victoria grinned. “Though
if you were still an ambassador, that would put you higher on the protocol list
than the chancellor, eh?”

“I was more on the level of special attaché, and anyway the
orcas don’t use titles. They don’t even understand them, as far as I could ever
tell. It’s one of those human concepts like ownership or jealousy that if you
finally get through a hint of what it means, they just think it’s funny. We’re
pretty funny to them in general. I used to wonder if they let me hang around
for my entertainment value.”

“What made you decide to quit?” Victoria asked bluntly.

“I thought about what you said, about the arguments between
the U.S. government and EarthSpace. I worried.”

“As do we all.”

“I didn’t want divided loyalties.” J.D. felt guilty for
making two true statements and implying a direct connection between them. For
the moment, though, she could not explain to Victoria, to anyone, her real
reasons for all her decisions of the last few days.

She stared out the window at the mountain slope, the
treeline a few hundred meters below, the peaks receding to blue in the
distance.

“Don’t worry,” Victoria said, mistaking her distraction. “The
acceleration isn’t bad at all.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

The plane jolted slightly as it released itself from the
gate. J.D. gasped and clutched Victoria’s hand.

Victoria smiled and let J.D. hold on as the plane slid
forward.

Victoria loved riding the spaceplane. She enjoyed the
landings, but she liked the takeoffs even better.

The plane accelerated, racing over its magnetic rails, its
delta-vee increasing, pressing Victoria against her couch. The plane reached
the bottom of the long fast slope and pulsed forward along the magnetic lines
of force, driven faster and faster by a great roller-coaster with a single
unending rise.

The magnetic rail flung the plane off its end and into the
air. The acceleration ceased abruptly: heart-fall hit.

“Wow,” J.D. said, breathless.

“What do you think?”

“That’s the first time I ever rode a roller-coaster that I
liked.”

Victoria felt the slight pressure of her body against the
seat belts as, in weightlessness, gravity no longer held her against her couch.
Beside her, J.D. peered eagerly through the roof-window as blue sky gave way to
a deep indigo that gradually faded to starry black.

“It’s just beautiful.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

The space-plane rotated around its long axis and the Earth
came into view through the roof-window. Despite the lack of gravity, the arrangement
of the couches made the window feel like “up.” Earth appeared to loom above
her. For her first few trips into space, Victoria had tried to cultivate an
attitude of nonchalance about the sight of Earth spinning slowly before her.
Gradually, though, she realized that even the veterans of space travel never
lost their awe, never grew hardened. No matter how matter-of-fact they acted
about the dangers or the hardships of the early days, they never pretended to
have the same cool indifference to Earth, vulnerable and without boundaries,
whole in their sight, a sphere they could cup in their hands.

Victoria glanced at J.D., who stared up through the window
with her mouth slightly open. Her short lank hair stood out from her head as if
she were underwater.

“I never thought... I’ve imagined this, I’ve seen it in
pictures and on film, even on sensory recording. I thought I’d know what it
felt like. But it’s different, seeing it for real.”

“It is,” Victoria said. “It’s always different, seeing it
for real.”

The Earth fell behind. The space-plane slid smoothly into an
orbit to catch up and dock with the transport to
Starfarer
.

“What’s it like to swim with the orcas?” Victoria said.

“It’s like this,” J.D. said.

“Like space travel?”

“Uh-huh. Looking at Earth from space is the nearest thing I’ve
ever felt to being underwater and suddenly realizing that the light at the
limit of your vision is the white patch on an orca’s side. Then when they come
closer... They’re magical. Until now I thought that if I could find the right
words, I’d be able to explain it to everyone. But no one ever found the right
words to explain — to me, anyway — how it feels to look at Earth from space.
Maybe no one can explain either.”

“Damn,” Victoria said. “I wish we’d had this conversation a
couple of days ago.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d have stolen your line, when I talked to the
premier last night. And I wish I’d thought of saying that to your Mr. Distler,
when I testified last year.”

“
I
didn’t vote for him,”
J.D. said. “Not for senator — I don’t even come from the same state — or when
he ran for president. Never mind, I know what you mean.”

“That’s what I should have told him — that he couldn’t
understand why we wanted to be here unless he came and saw it for himself.” Victoria
made herself relax, balancing her body between the contour couch and the seat
belts. She sighed. “Probably even that wouldn’t have helped.”

“The orcas are interested in
Starfarer
,”
J.D. said.

“The orcas? The divers, you mean?”

“There’s a diver who’s interested, yes. But I mean the orcas
themselves discussed applying to the expedition.”

“Outlandish,” Victoria said.

“Why do you say that?” J.D. asked mildly.

“I can’t imagine a cetacean on board a starship.”

“That’s the trouble,” J.D. said. “Nobody imagined it when
they designed the cylinders. The ecosystem was evolved around salt marshes, but
there isn’t much deep water.”

“Would you have proposed transporting an orca to
Starfarer
if there was deep water?”

“Not one — several. They’re social beings, even more so than
us. They get bored and slowly go crazy and die, all alone. They don’t like to
be confined, either, but they pointed out that when humans used to catch them
they lived in much smaller places than the largest bodies of water on
Starfarer
, for longer than the expedition is
planned to last.”

“Then you think it’s a good idea.”

“I think it would be wonderful to have two different kinds
of intelligent beings along on the expedition. I love the orcas, though. I love
their freedom. They would have been willing to risk it, and I think they could
have survived. But I wonder if they would have been happy?”

J.D. gazed out at space, at Earth, where the oceans
dominated. A weather system had just passed over the Pacific northwest, leaving
the area clearly visible.

o0o

The clicks and squeals and stutters of the orcas echoed
across the inlet. The cold, clear water moved with a gentle, irresistible
power, rolling fist-sized stones one against the other on the rocky shore,
creating a rumble of counterpoint to the calling of the whales.

J.D. swam. The artificial lung, nestled against her back,
absorbed oxygen from the sea and transferred it to her mask.

Kelp waved below. A bright orange nudibranch swam past,
propelled by its frilly mantle. At the limit of J.D.’s vision, a salmon flashed
silver-blue in the filtered light.

She shivered. Her metabolic enhancer could produce only so
much heat. She could have worn a wet suit, but it limited her contact with the
sea.

Soon she would have to swim away from the mouth of the inlet
and return to shore. She stroked upward and broke the surface of the clear
green water. Before her, the inlet opened out into a part of Puget Sound where
no one could go without an invitation. Apparently the divers would not invite
J.D. into the wilderness today.

The orcas remained out of sight around the headland. She
could imagine them playing, oblivious to the cold, their sleek black and white
bodies cutting the swells. By morning they would be gone. They could swim a
hundred kilometers between one dawn and the next. Orcas never stayed in one
place for long.

The sun on her face made the water feel even colder. J.D.
turned and swam toward shore. Her cabin stood back among the Douglas firs that
grew to the edge of the stony beach.

Just offshore, she stopped at the anchored deck. She teased
the artificial lung from her back and tethered it beneath the planks, where it
would feed and breathe and rest and pump sea water through itself until she
needed it again. She dove from the deck and swam easily home. Without the lung,
she no longer felt a part of the sea.