Superluminal (23 page)

“I guess you’d better.” She sounded much
less eager than before to hear what he had to say.

He would not have believed the simple telling of a story
could exhaust him so completely, but when he reached his dive from the edge of
the landing platform he was shaking with fatigue.

“Good lord,” Orca said. “Awake in
transit… no wonder.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Radu said,
pressing the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, trying to drive away
some of the tension and fatigue. “Marc said to wait until he had news for
me, but who knows how long it might take him to…” He had kept
Marc’s secrets and told Orca only his own, but that made some things
difficult to explain. “To make any progress.”

“Why don’t you call him and see if he has any
help for you so far? Then at least you’ll know if you need to try
something else.”

Radu suspected that Marc’s illness was too serious to
be dispensed with overnight, but a call was worth a try.

“That’s a good idea,” he said.

“I’ll wait for you in the lounge,” Orca
said, and left him alone.

Leaving off the outgoing video, Radu called Marc’s number.
If he did not answer, Radu would try to reach Laenea again. Surely she must be
back by now.

The flowing colors Marc used to represent himself
intertwined and separated.

“Hello.” Compared to his real voice, the
electronic tones were smooth and uninteresting. “Who’s calling,
please?”

“This is Radu Dracul, Marc. Are you better?”

“I beg your pardon? Who are you?”

Too startled to answer, Radu stared at the screen.

“Would you repeat your name, please?”

“Radu Dracul. Laenea Trevelyan’s friend.”
But it was clear to him what had happened: The illness had wiped out
Marc’s memory of their conversation, and of Radu himself.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m sorry to
have bothered you.”

“It’s only that I can’t find your name. I
have Laenea’s, of course.”

“I was with you a few hours ago, just before you
became ill. I shouldn’t have disturbed you so soon.” Upset and
disappointed, knowing he was being unfair, Radu reached to cut the connection.

“Wait,” said Marc’s voice. “Are you
aware that Marc has an analogue? I’m not Marc himself. I’m in use
when he isn’t available.”

“No,” Radu said. “I wasn’t aware of
that.”

“I apologize for being unfamiliar with you, but my
personal programming is several hours behind. Marc feels it is bad manners to
record everything he handles himself. That sometimes creates difficulties when
he is… called away suddenly, as he was last night.”

“I know. I was with him.”

“With him?”

“Yes. Is he better?”

“I’m specifically prohibited from discussing
that subject,” the analogue said. “May I help you in some other
way? Are you calling about Laenea? Marc, too, was friends with her. I’m
not looking forward to telling him she’s
lost.
”

“Lost…?”

“Her ship is lost.”

“How could it be lost?” Radu said, completely
stunned. “I don’t understand. I was just about to call her,
she’s out in training, there’s no indication that anything’s
wrong —” He was babbling. He stopped.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the analogue,
in a tone of sincere regret. “When you mentioned her I thought
you’d heard.”

“I haven’t heard anything.”

“Her ship has been declared lost. Her teacher’s
ship, I mean, of course.”

“But — it’s only overdue. A few days —”

“The ship is two weeks late. Dear boy, the first trip
out is meant to be brief.”

“How can they declare her lost? Just because someone
says so —”

“The training flight Miikala chose for her takes
between half an hour and half a day. Her presence introduces an unknown, of
course, into an equation that is empirical at best. But they’ve waited a
very long time —”

Radu stopped listening to Marc’s sympathetic,
informative, compassionless analogue, refusing to be forced to believe Laenea
was gone. He shut out the screen’s decorative patterns. Laenea was too
real to be lost. He had not yet even managed to convince himself they could
never be lovers again, though he knew it was impossible. He would never
convince himself she was lost: dead. He would never try.

He thought: She
was
in danger, and I knew it. I woke
up in transit because I knew it. Then he thought: It’s like the
hallucinations back on Twilight. Maybe they weren’t hallucinations. Maybe
Marc was right… And finally: The way Atna was right. He was wrong in
detail, but he was right all the same.

The silence drew his attention back to the phone. Two pools
of brilliant blue, like eyes, peered out at him. Startled, he blinked, and the
pattern swirled into abstract shapes again.

“I’m sorry to have been the one to tell
you,” Marc’s analogue said. “I would have said it more gently
had I realized you had no intimation.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Radu said dully.
“I’d better go.”

“Do you want to leave a message? Where can you be
reached?”

“I don’t know,” Radu said. “Tell
Marc…” He could think of nothing of any substance to say to Marc.
“Tell him I called.”

“He will know.”

“Good-bye.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t know who you were,”
said the analogue. It broke the connection and the vibrant colors faded away.

In a daze, Radu slowly drew on his clothes and went into the
divers’ lounge.

Orca’s smile faded when she saw his expression.

“What’s wrong?”

“Laenea’s ship has been declared lost.”

“Oh, Radu —” She took his hand in a
gesture of comfort, led him to a couch, and made him sit down. “I’m
so sorry… I met her, on the crew. I liked her.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I
can’t... I won’t.”

They sat together in silence for some minutes. If Orca
accepted that Laenea was dead, she did not try to persuade Radu to bow to
inevitability.

“Do you want me to leave you alone for a while? Or do
you want me to stay with you?”

“I dreamed of her on the way back from
Ngthummulun.”

“When? How could you? We didn’t have time for
any real sleep.”

“In transit, before I rejected the drugs. I usually
dream in transit, but this time I had nightmares.” His last image was of
Laenea crying out in distress, crying out for help he could not give. He did
not want that to be his last memory of her. He wanted to remember her with her
head thrown back, laughing.

“Oh, gods,” he groaned. He hid his face in his
hands. “I thought they were hallucinations, I thought they’d
stopped. Why do I dream about when my friends will die?”

Orca hesitated, then said, “You mean you dream
they’ll die, and they do?”

“I dream they need help, but I never know how to help
them. It happened during the plague,” he said miserably. “I know it
sounds crazy…”

“Not particularly,” Orca said. “But you
seemed to think so, when it was Atna.”

Radu drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around
them. “I did… but I didn’t. I thought what happened to me was
hallucination, or fever memory.”

Orca stroked his arm.

“Back home,” Radu said, “when people
started getting sick… my dreams changed. After a while I began to think I
knew who was going to die. I tried to warn people…”

“Oh, lord,” Orca said.

“Yes.” Radu shook his head. “It should
have taught me something, but I think I learned the wrong lesson. I acted
toward Atna just the way the others acted toward me.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Orca said.
“There wasn’t anything you could do back on Twilight and there
wasn’t anything you could do in transit. Even pilots don’t look for
lost ships. I’m sorry Laenea is gone, but you’re the one
who’s in trouble now. You’ve got to look out for yourself.”

“Why?”

“What? Do you want to just give up to the
pilots?”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Radu said. The
slash on his wrist throbbed. “I mean why doesn’t anybody look for
lost ships?”

“Because they tried for years to find any of them,
even one, and they never did. So they stopped looking.”

“They can’t find them because they can’t
communicate with them. But Laenea did need help, and I knew it.”

“Radu, she’s
lost.
”

“Lost — that doesn’t mean she’s
dead. Nobody knows what it means! She could still be alive.” He looked
toward the exit door, thinking about what lay beyond the divers’
quarters.

Orca followed his gaze. “You can’t go out
there!”

“I have to. I have to try to get them to listen to me.
I dreamed I could help, if I only knew what to do. Now I know. I have to find
her.”

“What makes you think they’ll believe
you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “They have no reason
to trust me and several reasons not to. And they see me as a threat. But I have
to try. Otherwise Laenea and her teacher and the people in their crew will all
die.” He stood up. He still felt shaky.

Orca caught his arm, gripping him just hard enough to remind
him of her strength.

“What the hell did I come back for you for, if
you’re just going to go out and let them throw you in the ocean again? I
could be halfway home by now,” she said. “This is just
crazy.”

“I don’t blame you for feeling that way,”
Radu said. He laid his hand gently on hers, and she relaxed her grip.

“Sorry.”

“Never mind,” Radu said. “You’re
probably right, after all.”

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be going out
there.” She followed him into the hall and to the center of the
divers’ quarters, where a doorway led to the public elevator lobby.

“Thank you, for everything,” Radu said.

“I don’t guess you happen to be one of those
people who think that since I saved your life I get to tell you what to do with
it from now on.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said, then laughed.
He hugged her, perhaps a little longer, a little more tightly, than if this had
been a regular farewell between two members of a starship crew. If the pilots
believed him, if he could persuade them to do as he wished, then he would have
to endure their company for some inestimable time alone, without the buffer of
another normal human being. He was very glad he would have the memory of
Orca’s friendship.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye.”

He faced the door, reluctant to open it, then stepped close
enough for it to sense him. It slid aside, then slid closed behind him.

The two pilots waiting for him rose. Vasili Nikolaievich,
particularly, looked surprised to see him. Neither pilot appeared to have any
idea what to do with him now that he had come to face them of his own free
will.

“You wouldn’t tell me what you wanted of
me,” Radu said, “so I’ll say what I want of you.”

Vasili scowled. “I don’t think you have that
choice.”

Radu walked toward the pilots, feeling more and more tense.

“Laenea Trevelyan’s ship has been lost,”
he said. “I think I can find it. I think that was what was happening to
me when —”

“You… what?” said the other pilot.
“Wait. We can’t discuss this here.” She reached out to take
his arm. “Come along with us, will you?”

Radu drew back.

“I’ll come,” he said. “I don’t
mean to be rude. Your proximity is as uncomfortable to me as mine is to
you.”

“You think so, do you?” Vasili said.

“Shut up, Vaska,” the other pilot said.
“We’ve screwed this up badly enough already. Come on, let’s
go someplace where we can talk.”

o0o

Orca let Radu Dracul leave, all alone. He was an adult; he
had the right to make his own decisions, even if he did not know what he was
doing, even if the decisions were stupid ones.

Her cousin glided past the porthole, brushing the glass with
the tip of her fluke. The soft sound reminded Orca of her other
responsibilities, and her promise to her family; it reminded her of last night,
swimming free with her friend. Orca always felt isolated when she left the sea,
as if all her senses had been damped down to half intensity. It was not only
sound that carried much more efficiently in water than in air, but touch and
scent and heat perception as well. The texture was altogether different. The
density of experience increased a hundredfold. Orca cupped her hands against
the port so she could see through reflections. Her cousin swooped by again.

Orca turned on the speaker. She and her friend could
converse only in middle speech, when one of them was in the air. The language
was denser than Standard, but filmy and insubstantial compared to true speech.

The cousins were more intelligent than human beings, though
not as much more intelligent as were any of the great whales, about whom Orca
felt too much awe for friendship. Yet they were naive as well. Thousands of
years of predation by humans had done nothing to temper that quality into
cynicism or doubt. Since the revolution, whales were no longer legal prey of
humans. A few outlaw whalers had tried to defy the ban, but they disappeared
and no one ever saw them again. Orca’s mother knew something about that,
but seldom mentioned it unless she had had a long day undersea and one brandy
too many after dinner.

The differences between whales and human beings, which
Orca’s brother hardly noticed, seemed so enormous to Orca that she found
it marvelous that the two species could communicate at all. There were great
gaps in understanding. Humans could not understand the whales’ acceptance
of events; whales could not comprehend anger or hatred, or the even more alien
emotions of ambition and fear. They had concepts so far beyond human
understanding that even the descriptions made no sense, even in true speech.
Orca’s brother knew what they meant, but he had tried to explain them to
her, both in the water and in the air, and failed every time.

Come out of there, her cousin said. I can’t see you
properly, I can barely hear you, I can’t touch you. I want to hear about
what you’ve been doing.