Superluminal (36 page)

“You seem very sure of that.”

“Well, what’s a few hours? It will take you a
long time to turn him into a pilot.”

“Radu Dracul cannot be a pilot,” Ramona-Teresa
said. She poured herself another drink. So far she was completely unaffected by
the alcohol.

Laenea frowned. “But I thought — since he
perceives seventh —”

“He does. And six other dimensions. But some are
different dimensions than those you perceive, which are the dimensions of
transit. The intersection is not completely congruous. Without someone to
follow, he’d be lost, he’d be blind.”

“Then why do you want him back so badly? Why
don’t you just leave him alone?”

“His perceptions are of a different worth entirely
than yours.”

“It ought to be obvious to you, of all people, why we
want to study him,” van de Graaf said to Laenea.

“Hah!” Vasili said. “She doesn’t
even have to think about it. She knows she’s safe.”

“Vaska,
what
are you talking about?”

“You can’t be lost!” Vasili shouted.
“If you get lost, he can find you. What about the rest of
us
?”

“Oh,” Laenea said. “You’re right,
I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that.” The reason, though, was
less selfishness than a determination to learn so much about transit that she
never again would be lost, and need to be found. “I’m sure, though,
if he
can
find others, he’d do it willingly.”

“It seems unlikely to me that he could find anyone but
you,” Ramona-Teresa said.

“Then what —”

“I think,” van de Graaf said, “that his
abilities are unique, interrelated, and the result of a single basic change,
brought about by the illness he survived. I think it likely that the viral
genome integrated itself into his chromosomes.”

“I disagree in part,” Ramona-Teresa said.
“I believe that most of his abilities are present in some percentage of
the population, but that they can only be expressed in the proper environment.
I believe the illness forged some perceptual link between you and him. If you
look at the mathematics, you can see that anyone who is aware of seventh is
very close to any other person — or any other point — in normal
space-time.”

Van de Graaf interrupted. “Whatever the details of the
effect, the cause is the illness. It must be. But the samples I took from him
— skin and blood, nothing more invasive — show no obvious
alteration. I need more samples, of more tissues, nerve tissue in particular,
in order to study him properly.”

“No wonder he ran,” Laenea said. “You want
to sample his
brain?
”

“Don’t be ridiculous, pilot. I’m not going
to dissect him. Any peripheral nerve cell would probably do; he wouldn’t
even notice it. He has no reason to fear me, and even if he did, he had no way
of knowing the direction of my speculations.”

“Only a couple of hours of being questioned. You can
learn a lot from questions, even if you don’t know the answers. He
isn’t stupid. He’s a colonist, he may not have a fine-edged
education like you do. But he isn’t stupid.”

“If I thought so before, I don’t think so
now,” van de Graaf said.

“You know him better than the rest of us,
Laenea,” Vasili said. “Is he so selfish, does he dislike pilots so
much, that he’d refuse a little more time and a few more tests, if it
would save some of our lives?”

“He’s the least selfish person I know,”
Laenea said, annoyed. “And he doesn’t dislike pilots.”

“That isn’t my experience.”

“I think you’re trying to make individual
dislike into something more general,” Laenea said, letting the edge in
her voice come through.

Vasili colored.

“You still haven’t explained,” Laenea said
to Ramona and van de Graaf. “If you don’t think he can find anybody
else, why do you need him back so badly?”

“Because the change might be transmissible.”

Laenea sat very still, trying to change the meaning of what
she had just heard, but failing; trying to control a slowly rising fury, but
failing.

“Good gods,” she said, horrified. “Do you
realize what you’re saying?” She stood up, her fists clenched.
“How could you even consider such a thing? Are you monsters?”

“What?” van de Graaf said.

“Laenea!” Ramona-Teresa said, in honest protest.

“Don’t you know what that illness did to
Radu’s world? It killed every member of his family, and it nearly killed
him. I was there, I saw it —”

They waited in patience till she finished her outburst.

Ramona chuckled, low and soft. Laenea glared at her.

“My dear,” Ramona said, “if you only knew
how familiar that all sounds.”

“What are you talking about?”

“‘It’s horrible!’ ” Ramona
said in a voice not her own. “‘Taking young people and ripping out
their hearts and putting in machines instead!’ ”

“But —” Laenea said, confused. “It
isn’t the same.”

“How, not?”

“We’re all volunteers, for one thing.”

“Do you think we mean to recreate a plague and infect
the population with it? No wonder you think us monsters!”

“Who would volunteer? It kills half the people it
touches.”

“More than half,” van de Graaf said.
“Nearly all, in fact.”

“Well, then.”

“Don’t you see? That’s why we have to
study him. To find out what makes him different. Why did he survive?”

“Can you swear it will be safe?”

“Of course not. Most assuredly it won’t be, not
completely.”

“Then he’ll never let you study him, and no one
will volunteer anyway.”

“Some might,” Marc said.

She looked at him, shocked.

“If it made me able to fly again. If Kri’s
hypothesis is correct, it might do that. Then,” he said softly,
“the regeneration might be worth it.”

“The whole point is that we don’t know how he
can do what he does, or why — in fact we don’t even know all of
what he can do. We need to study him.”

Laenea remained unsoothed.

“He’ll let us test him if you ask him to,
Laenea,” Vasili said.

“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“You
are
selfish,” Vasili said with
contempt.

“That may be true,” Laenea said, sick of the
accusation. “But what I am more than anything right now is angry.”

“Laenea,” Ramona said, “we must study him.
If we can find more people like him —”

“Or create them,” Vasili said, earning himself a
sharp look from Ramona.

“— we might develop the ability to communicate
with ships in transit, or even directly between the inhabited worlds.”

“Ramona, I can see the potential, even weighed against
the risks. But you’re going to have a hard time convincing Radu —
if
you can find him.”

“He has to come to us if he ever wants to go
home,” Vasili said.

Laenea sighed. “He’d sacrifice that if he
didn’t believe he could trust you.”

“He must cooperate with us,” Ramona said.
“He’s the only source of information we have.”

“If you’ve got to study something, why
don’t you study the virus? It might tell you all you need to know.”

“Your expedition was all too efficient,” van de
Graaf said. “There’s no record of any subsequent case of plague.”

“You think it’s extinct, then?” No one was
allowed on Twilight without being vaccinated, but the antibody was to surface
proteins, not genetic material. If the organism had disappeared, no one could
reconstruct it.

“Possibly. More likely it still exists, in whatever
indigenous host it occupied before people landed on Twilight. Finding it might
be difficult, though. Its source was never identified.”

What van de Graaf was telling her was that the most
straightforward way of finding the virus would be to send unvaccinated people
to the surface of Twilight and wait until they got sick.

“But you can’t…”

“We’d prefer not to,” van de Graaf said.

Marc listened to the conversation quietly, sipping tequila,
conserving his strength. He had never been on the administrators’ deck
before; it had not yet existed when he was, so briefly, a pilot. Marc knew real
antiques from reproductions, and this room’s furnishings were real.
Despite the glass wall looking out into the sea, the central fireplace seemed
appropriate.

Kri continued to worry the subject of Radu Dracul’s
whereabouts, but no one had even mentioned Orca and her brother. Marc was less
inclined than the others to assume their departure was a whim, unconnected with
Radu’s disappearance.

“Well,” Kri said, “security’s on it,
and that’s all we can do for now.” She downed her drink.
“We’d all better get some sleep, and start fresh in the
morning.”

Marc rose slowly.

“I’ll bid you farewell till tomorrow,” he
said. “I will rest better in my own bed.”

Laenea rose. “Let me walk you home,” she said.
“You look tired.”

Marc could see Kri preparing to argue against Laenea’s
leaving. He suspected Kri would insist that he stay here — which he
definitely did not want to do — before she would permit Laenea to go out.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ll be quite
all right. I just want to get home before I overtire myself.”

He clasped Laenea’s wrist, and she gripped his. The
touch felt strange, but not unpleasant.

As soon as Marc left the administration deck, he opened a
communications terminal. He had never acquired an internal communicator,
fearing it might further confuse the insulted tissue of his brain. He signaled
his analogue, which awakened quickly.

“Where are you?” it said. Its voice remained
smooth and calm.

“I’m on my way home.”

“Why are you away from your home?”

“It was an emergency.”

“You should have let me go on duty.”

“I know,” Marc said. “I’m sorry. I
forgot. Would you look out in the foyer and see if anyone’s there?”

“Of course.” After a barely perceptible pause,
the analogue said, “No one at all.”

“Thank you. I’ll be back soon.”

Marc left the terminal and hobbled homeward, deep in
thought: If only he had turned on the analogue… If Radu Dracul had come
to him for help, he had found nothing. Well, there was no changing what was past;
the future would have to concern him now.

Marc suspected that Kathell Stafford had had good reason to
speak via a voice synthesizer to a representative of the transit authority.

o0o

Orca surfaced, trod water, and contacted Harmony. She had to
use a satellite to jump the communication over the mountains, but true speech
adapted well to radio frequency, and no eavesdropper could decipher her
family’s dialect.

Her mother answered.

Hello,
chérie
, she said, mixing true speech and
French as their family sometimes did. Where are you?

Halfway home, Orca said. With Mark.

She added her brother’s true speech name.

Their mother laughed, understanding by the construction that
Orca’s brother had adopted a surface name, and understanding the joke
immediately. She liked to watch
The Man from Atlantis
, too.

The news reports are intriguing,
chère petite fille
,
and the gossip even more. How much of it is true?

For once what really happened is more exciting by half, Orca
replied. I’ll explain when I get home. My crewmate may come to stay. Has
he called?

No.

I don’t know where he is, Orca said. Or how he’s
traveling. I told him to ask for us in the harbor at Victoria. He needs our
help,
mon-amie-maman
. Are you feeling revolutionary? Is father?

Your father, always. Me? If necessary.

It may be. When my friend arrives — Orca sent a
soundname for Radu; any diver or whale who heard it would recognize him
immediately — he’s an offworlder, she added. He’s shy, and
modest to several faults. His trouble isn’t of his own making.

We’ll make him welcome, youngling.

Thank you,
maman-amie
.

Shall I send the boat? You’ll be very late for the
gathering, otherwise.

Orca sent a grimace, and her mother laughed again.

Send the plane, instead,
maman?
The misery
won’t last so long.

I will,
amie-fille
, who loves to fly a ship from
world to world, but not island to island.

o0o

The faint glow of the instrument panel gave the only light,
the whisper of the noise-baffled propellers the only sound. Radu floated alone
in silent darkness, waiting for the sky to lighten, looking forward to the
dawn.

His eyelids drooped; he dozed. He jerked awake when his chin
touched his chest. The night had retreated by a single shade of blue.

He tried to remember the last time he had slept real,
undrugged sleep. He discounted both sleeping in transit (which seemed very much
something
other
), and recovering from unconsciousness and hypothermia in
the diver’s quarters. His last full night’s sleep was on
Earthstation, when Orca shared his room and his bed. His time-sense automatically
sorted through all his perceptions and told him how long ago that had been,
subjectively, as well as in elapsed time on earth, an objective measurement. He
laughed softly: if objective measurement even made sense anymore.

He could not stay awake till dawn. He turned on the
autopilot, glad that it contained only navigational functions. Had it possessed
cognition, the computer might answer radio calls and give their position away.
Flying very low, the airship would avoid both navigational radar and small craft
routes that might otherwise intersect their path.

He was so tired he had to check the autopilot settings four
times to get an agreement on the course.

I’ll just nap for an hour, he thought, changing one of
the passenger seats to its reclining position. An hour, and then I’ll be
able to take over from the autopilot again.

He fell instantly and deeply asleep.