Superluminal (26 page)

“Did you call out to me?” he said stupidly.

“No,” Ramona-Teresa said, “you cried out
to us.”

“We’re near the end of the flight path, we
don’t have anywhere to go but back to the beginning or out into normal
space,” Vasili said.

Radu’s absurd mental clock lurched and chirped and
told him he had been asleep nearly as long as he had walked in the dream.
Relating dream time to real time, or time as real as time ever got in transit,
he would just be turning onto the sixth track, the longest one.

“Just keep going.”

“How far?”

Radu shrugged.

Vasili scowled and stalked away.

In the control room, Radu tried to tell the pilots about his
dream. He started twice, and stopped twice, unable to find the right words. He
tried again, fumbling to express concepts for which he had no language.

“I was walking on a path,” he said. “It
was very precise. Each turning was a right angle, but…” He
hesitated, certain Vasili and Ramona would laugh at him. “Every time I
started on a new path, I thought it was perpendicular to all the others. I
never climbed, the ground was very flat —” He stopped again. He was
not conveying information, only his own tension and confusion, and that was no
way to make the pilots believe him. Besides, he knew better than anyone that
dreams were images. What he needed to do was understand what the images meant.
“That happened for six segments. But when I got to the turning, at the
seventh, I heard Laenea. That’s when I woke up,” he said lamely.

Neither pilot spoke. Vasili had turned translucently pale.
He looked over at Ramona. The older pilot gazed at Radu, her serenity shaken by
a hint of shock. She bent her head down, pinching the bridge of her nose
between thumb and forefinger as if she felt very weary.

“I could have misinterpreted the extra
directions,” Radu said in a rush.

“Not directions,” Ramona-Teresa said,
“dimensions.”

“
Seven
of them?”

“Seven spatial dimensions in theory, six in practice,
until now.”

“Seventh doesn’t
exist
, Ramona,”
Vasili said.

Ramona managed to smile. “True,” she said,
“nor will it until someone perceives it.”

“That’s a lot of philosophical bullshit, if it
were there one of us would have found it, I’ve looked for it hard
enough.”

“Ah,” Ramona said, “you’ve detected
a flaw in the proof?”

Vasili glowered at her. “Proofs are boring.”

Ramona laughed. “This is hard on your pride, it is on
mine, too, believe me.”

“What difference does it make?” Radu said
desperately. “It isn’t another dimension we’re looking for
— it’s Laenea’s ship.”

“He doesn’t even understand what this
means,” Vasili said to Ramona, in disgust.

“If we find the lost ship? I think I do,” Radu
said.

“Not the lost ship — seventh.”

Radu frowned.

“You can navigate our galaxy with four,” Vasili
said, “people who perceive four are easy to find, those of us who see
fifth and sixth are a little rarer, and we don’t much matter anyway
because sixth only reaches empty intergalactic space — it’s seventh
that will open up the universe.”

“We haven’t even finished exploring the systems
in easy reach,” Radu said. “What’s the difference if we can
get to Andromeda, or only halfway?”

“We’d be unlimited — we could follow the
history of a quasar, experimental physics can catch up to the theory, the
possibilities are unimaginable.” Vasili turned slowly toward the
viewport. “And maybe we’ll even figure out just exactly what it is
we’re doing in here.”

“All right,” Radu said softly to Vasili’s
back. He knew he should be excited by the idea of a tremendous gain in
knowledge, but it only made him feel weary and overwhelmed. “All
right,” he said. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t, you really don’t,”
Vasili said without looking at him, “and it’s all coincidence
anyway.”

“Truly?” Ramona said. She watched Vasili while
she breathed from her mask. He looked at her, looked away, and fidgeted.
“You’re willing to make yourself believe that, for your
pride?”

Vasili put his own breathing mask over his face and slumped
down in sulky silence.

“What you just described,” Ramona said to Radu,
“was a fair representation of the plan for a first training flight, in
which the teacher takes the new pilot along the intersection of the hyperplane
with one dimension at a time.” She took a breath. “First you orient
the new pilot with the normal three, then you introduce fourth, and fifth and
sixth if they can perceive them.” She paused to let that sink in.
“As far as I can tell — assuming the usual progression, and
relating your perception of time to mine of distance — you’ve given
an accurate tracing of the path we’ve been following.”

“I…” Radu shook his head.

“Yes,” Ramona said, “it’s a lot for
us to accept, too.”

“So what?” Vasili said, gesturing toward the
viewport. “Can he look out there and show us where to go, to find
seventh?” His tone was belligerent. “Can you even perceive
fourth?”

“No,” Radu said. “I can’t see
anything at all.”

“We’re still following their flight plan, but
we’re near the point where they should have turned back to the start, so
what do we do when we get there?”

“I don’t know yet,” Radu said.
“Please don’t turn the ship. It isn’t time.”

“Time doesn’t
mean
anything in transit!”
Vasili shouted.

“It does to me,” Radu said gently.

“Vaska,” Ramona said, “that is enough, you
agreed to come, but we aren’t so far from home that we can’t return
and start the search over.”

“You need the best pilot you can get,” Vasili
said sullenly.

“That’s true, but I’m wondering if we have
you at all.” She paused, and Vasili shifted uncomfortably. “You
aren’t so much better that this flight would be out of the question with
Chase, or Jenneth, or even me at the controls.”

“We can’t go back now,” Radu said.
“I don’t care what he says to me, as long as he’ll try to
follow what I think I’ve found out.”

“I would — if you’d only decide what it
is!”

“Keep going,” Radu said. “Just keep
going.”

o0o

Between the long wait and being so near the pilots, Radu
found it difficult to remain calm. Until now his fragile belief in a perception
he did not understand had been a desperate attempt to fend off reality, the
reality of Laenea’s death. Now that the perception had connected itself
so neatly to something concrete, it was becoming reality itself. The scene in
the viewport remained, for Radu, a plain gray fog. He was so bored by it that
the imaginary flashes of color increased in intensity. He folded his arms
across his chest and slumped against the wall. He wished that if he were going
to hallucinate, he would do it in an interesting manner.

Vasili had left the control room for a few minutes; Radu sat
in the pilot’s chair beside Ramona.

“Is the ship, right now, traveling through six spatial
dimensions?”

“Yes,” Ramona said, “ordinarily Vasili
would be piloting the ship freely within a multidimensional space, usually a
hypercube.” She paused to breathe. “But as we’re following a
training run, at the moment we’re proceeding along the intersection of
the fifth- and sixth-dimensional hyperplanes.”

Radu tried to imagine it, and failed. “I don’t
see how you can even begin to handle all the variables.”

“In two ways — mathematically, by approximation,
by representing the hyperplanes as a combination of two-dimensional spaces, the
way most of us do it.”

“And the other way?”

“By conceptual purity.”

“What?”

Ramona smiled at his expression of confusion. “Have
you ever known someone who can always prove mathematical theorems, but who
skips so many steps that no one else can understand their proofs?”

Radu nodded.

“They make an art of science, they make jumps of
intuition that the rest of us can’t follow: Vaska is like that.”

“I’m not, though. It doesn’t seem strange
to me that I can’t do it. But transit’s
out
there, right in
front of me. Why can’t I see it?”

“I believe the question is not why you don’t
perceive it, but why we do, which no one has ever explained.”

Radu shook his head.

“Does everything look the same to you, inside the
ship?” Ramona asked.

Radu nodded. “Not to you?”

“Far from it, here, and back home we perceive
what’s called a shadow change; one must block it deliberately most of the
time, or it overloads you.”

Block it deliberately? Radu thought.

He realized that Vasili was standing to one side of him. He
got up quickly. The younger pilot sat down in his seat without acknowledging
him.

“We’re well past where Miikala and Laenea should
have turned back,” he said, “is this familiar territory to you,
Ramona?”

“No, I’ve not been far on this track.”

“Nor have I — I
must
take a bearing, if I
don’t there’s no telling where we’ll come out, and there are
a lot of anomalies in this region; I’m worried about the
perturbations.”

“We’ve got to keep going,” Radu said.
“We’re nearly there.”

“What’s the point of going there —
wherever
there
is — if we can’t get back?”

“How can we be getting lost already? We haven’t
been out that long.” Their expressions changed and Radu wanted to scream
with frustration. “I know! I know it doesn’t mean anything to you,
but it’s true nonetheless!”

“I told you he didn’t understand about
seventh,” Vasili said.

“Each successive spatial dimension gives the ship an
exponential increase in range,” Ramona said patiently to Radu, “so
it’s possible to go a very short distance in transit, but a very long way
in normal space, particularly when you’ve moved up to sixth.”

“Oh,” Radu said. “But — just a
little farther?”

Ramona sighed. “We’d best do as he asks,
Vaska.”

“I won’t take orders from a crew member!”
Vasili fumbled for his oxygen mask and took a long deep breath.

“Can you return us exactly to this spot, going the
same direction and the same speed?” Radu asked.

“I was under the impression that was what I was here
for.”

“All right.”

The acquiescence was so sudden that Vasili looked confused.

“You have your wish, Vasili Nikolaievich,”
Ramona-Teresa said; “take us out of transit.”

Vasili settled in at his controls. A moment later the gray
of the viewport glowed to black. Each pilot took a deep breath and resumed a
relatively normal pattern of breathing. Radu stopped his count of the seconds
they had spent on the sixth track. He had so many different time-lines going
together in his mind that he wondered if he were in danger of losing them all.

He looked outside, and gasped.

The ship lay close to the fiery disk of a forming star, so
close it could be engulfed at any moment, so close Radu could see rivers and
points of brilliant color in the great burning spinning central sphere —

He glanced at Vasili, at Ramona. The younger pilot looked
irritated, the older bemused, but they were quite calm. Still alarmed, Radu
turned back to the port.

Perspective jolted him. It was not a single coalescing star
that lay below the ship. His eyes had tricked him, following color to create
motion. What he was looking at did indeed spin, at an enormous speed. But it
was itself so enormous that its motion would be imperceptible if Radu watched
it for his lifetime.

Feeling dizzy, he gazed down at the Milky Way. Its filmy,
fuzzy edge crossed the port at a diagonal.

Ramona made a sound of mild surprise. “We
have
come a long way. Vaska, can you mark our position?”

“I think so, here, with the x team’s computer.
But just how much farther are we supposed to go?”

They both glanced at Radu, without asking the question that
was unaskable about transit.

“About ten minutes, subjective time,” he said.
“But that won’t match the clock. Do you want me to plan to give you
a countdown?”

“Good gods, no! Haven’t you learned
anything
about pilots?”

“I’m sorry,” Radu said, startled by the
vehemence of Vasili’s reply.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you but Ramona and I
would like to get home from this alive.”

“Vaska,” Ramona said, “he’s done
nothing to upset your balance. He will not. So stop harrying him.”

“I’m sorry,” Radu said again. “I
didn’t realize just how careful you have to be.”

“We’re generally a bit more resilient,”
Ramona said. “But you put us under an extra strain, as we do you.”
She rubbed her hand along the side of her face, and closed her eyes she looked
as if exhaustion were about to overcome her.

Radu took the hint and left the control room.

He stopped near Orca’s sleep chamber and sat beside
her. The anesthetic was supposed to be relaxing, but Orca’s teeth were
clenched. He could see the muscles in a band down the side of her jaw, and the
tendons standing out in her neck. She moved, shifting as if to wake.

He wished he
could
wake her and talk to her. But the
wish was too selfish to indulge. He was worried about the delay, and he hoped
the pilots would not be long at their task. It would be unfair to Orca to wake
her; she would hardly be out of the box before she had to climb back in.

He watched her uneasy sleep for a long time. Her strange
hands were clamped into fists. In his imagination she needed the comfort of
another human being as much as he did.

He passed his hands over his eyes, and went back to the crew
lounge. In front of the viewport he flung himself into a chair.

Perhaps he was doing unconsciously what Ramona had said she
could do deliberately: blocking out the new perceptions. He lay back, trying to
feel all his senses, to leave himself open to any sight or sound or feeling
such as he had experienced in his dream.