Superluminal (37 page)

o0o

Laenea woke slowly and with great pleasure, luxuriating in
the warmth of the bed and the silence and the quiet blue light of her room. She
stretched her bare arms wide, feeling not even a twinge of pain, feeling as if
nothing could ever hurt her again.

Flinging off the bedclothes, she rose and dressed without
taking time for a shower. She was eager for whatever today would bring.

In the common room of the suite given over to the three
pilots, Kristen van de Graaf and Ramona-Teresa sat sipping coffee.

“Good morning,” Laenea said, and poured coffee
for herself.

“Good morning.” The doctor sounded tired.

Instead of replying to Laenea, Ramona put aside her cup, and
rose. “It’s time for me to catch the ferry,” she said. Her
small duffel bag lay beside the door.

“Where are you going?” Laenea asked.

“To see Miikala’s family. To tell them what
happened.”

“Should… should I come with you?”

Ramona hesitated. “I think… I think perhaps
someday they’ll be able to speak with you, Laenea. I think someday
they’ll want to. But not now. Not yet.”

Laenea touched Ramona’s hand. “I
understand,” she said. “Ramona, I’m so sorry —”

Ramona-Teresa embraced Laenea, hugging her tight. Then she
pulled away, grabbed her duffel bag, and left.

Laenea took her coffee and sat down, wishing she could be
more help to Ramona. She glanced across the room at Dr. van de Graaf, whose
eyes were slightly bloodshot.

“Did you get any sleep at all?” Laenea asked.

“A little, on and off.”

“You look exhausted.”

“I’ve had other things on my mind. There’s
still no trace of your friend.”

“He came back before,” Laenea said. She still
believed he would return, though she wondered if he might be better off to stay
away.

“I think he must have gone with the divers,” van
de Graaf said. “If they’ve taken him in, and he refuses to leave
voluntarily, it will be… awkward.”

Laenea knew as well as anyone how jealous the divers were of
their sovereign territory. They fiercely protected their cousins from
harassment, whether malicious or merely curious.

“I still think you should leave him alone for a
while.”

Van de Graaf picked up a slice of toast, bit off one corner,
and chewed it thoughtfully.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said.
“He does get rather stubborn when he’s pressed far enough.”

Vasili Nikolaievich emerged from his room, hollow-eyed and
haunted. Laenea wondered what to say to him. His envy and disappointment
saddened her.

“Vaska —”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I know
what to do.” His words were as intense as his gaze. He turned to van de
Graaf. “I have to go to Ngthummulun. I have to find Atnaterta. He knew
what was going to happen —”

He described Radu’s experience on Atna’s home
world. Laenea listened without comment. She had flown with Atna. It was true
that he was an excellent navigator. It was true that Ngthummulun had produced
equally excellent pilots.

“If Atna can teach me what he did — how he knew
what was going to happen to Radu —” Vasili’s words trailed
off, as if he had not quite finished imagining what it was that he wanted from
Atna. He stared at van de Graaf, anxious for her reaction. “Can’t
you see —”

Laenea held back from saying what she thought. None of the
pilots from Ngthummulun had perceived seventh, and none was as good a pilot as
Vaska. Laenea herself, though she could do the one thing Vasili wished to be
able to do, was not as fine a pilot as he.

Not yet, anyway, she thought.

Dr. van de Graaf stroked her eyebrow with the tip of one
finger. “It’s worth checking,” she said.

Neither her expression nor her tone revealed whether she
believed Vasili’s idea to be reasonable, or whether she simply had no
more heart than Laenea for crushing out his dream. She put aside her toast and
said, “I assume you’re both ready to do some more exploring.”

Laenea stood and put down her cup so quickly that some of
the coffee splashed out onto the table.

“I am,” Laenea said. “When do we
leave?”

“Not quite yet,” van de Graaf said.

Laenea took one step toward her, hands outspread in
supplication, ready to argue against a delay of weeks or even days.

Van de Graaf smiled. “Finish your breakfast,
first.”

o0o

When Radu woke he thought, groggily, did I sleep? It was
nearly dawn, the sky was midnight blue, and now it’s no lighter.

Perhaps he had merely dozed for a moment, then awakened
again. He thought about his time sense.

It was night again, not night still. He had slept the whole
day; he was approaching his destination.

Victoria was a stolid, beautifully tended, rather fussy old
city. The last streaks of scarlet sunset faded into the ocean. Lights flicked
on here and there, illuminating windows in the ivy-covered stone of the Empress
Hotel and picking out the cabins of rows of sailboats moored along the piers.
Flowerbeds covered the banks of the harbor. In the dusk, the colors dimmed to
white and shades of gray.

Radu nosed the airship toward the landing field by the ferry
dock. It was plainly marked on the chart, plainly marked against the land by
several sets of concentric circles, worn into the grass by the landing wheels
of different sized airships, one set circumscribing each mooring mast.

Landing a blimp solo was even more difficult than launching
it. He would have to descend upwind of the mast and let the wind push the ship
into position. That carried the risk of ramming the mast and puncturing the
envelope. But it was his only choice. Unless the air was completely still
— and it was not; he could tell from the way the blimp handled and from
the ripples across the dark water — then trying to drag the ship against
the wind would be sheer stupidity.

A shadowy silhouette ran across the field toward him as his
craft neared the ground. Radu tensed, ready to take off again. Perhaps Kathell
had failed to deceive the administrators; perhaps she had even turned him in.
He found her character incomprehensible, how seriously she took her word a
mystery.

Radu had left the radio off, so, for all he knew, whatever
agency controlled the city’s airspace might well have been ordering him
all afternoon to give up and come down.

The airship dropped low enough for Radu to see that the
woman running toward him, far from being dressed in the uniform of a security
guard or the severe suit of an executive, wore raggy cutoffs and a tank top.
She paced the airship. Radu opened the window and leaned out.

“Come down till I can reach the ladder!” she
yelled. “Be ready to drop some ballast and take off again.”

“Who are you?”

She raised her hand, fingers spread. Light from one of the
field’s floodlamps turned the thin membranes of her swimming webs pink
and gold.

Radu dipped the airship sharply down and reached across to
open the door. The diver grabbed the ladder and swung herself into the gondola.
As it sank, and the landing wheel bounced against the grass, Radu dumped sixty
kilos of ballast and gunned the engines. Lighter now than before the diver came
aboard, the ship took off at a steep angle.

The diver scrambled up the tilted floor and slid into the
forward passenger seat.

“Well,” she said, looking him up and down,
“you’re definitely the person Orca sent me to meet. You can call me
Wolf. What’s your name?”

“Radu Dracul,” he said. “Didn’t Orca
tell you who I was?”

“Yes,” Wolf said. “And a great deal more.
She gave you a true name that’s a description of you. One would have to
be blind and deaf not to recognize you after hearing it.”

“What is it?” Radu asked.

“I can’t say it out of water. It would just
sound like cacophony, anyway. That was the idea, over the radio, if she’d
used your surface name it would have been obvious who we were talking about
even if no one not a diver could understand the whole conversation.”

“Oh,” Radu said. “Thank you for meeting
me.”

“Head north,” Wolf said. “We’ll be
at Harmony by midnight.”

He did as she said. As they passed over a tremendous domed
Victorian building, strings of white light bulbs lit up, outlining it
completely. Its walls vanished into darkness and it became a phantom carnival
structure.

“What is
that?
” Radu asked.

Wolf chuckled at his reaction. “The Parliament building,”
she said.

“Why do they do that to it?”

“For tradition. For the tourists. Just for fun, I
guess. They’ve been doing it for more than a hundred years.”

The blimp sailed over the Parliament building, then north.
Victoria fell behind them. The lights of small towns dotted the coast, and
ground cars on the highway spread tiny moving fans of illumination before them.
In the Strait, a pale navigational beacon flashed strobically, streaking the
water with its beam. Reflected by its own sails, chased by its phosphorescent
wake, a ferryboat glistened like an elongated carousel.

“Did Orca tell you why I’ve come to you?”

“No,” Wolf said. “She said you needed
help.”

“That’s certainly true,” Radu said.
“I wouldn’t have involved her, or you, but she was already involved,
and I couldn’t see any alternative.”

“She also said you were her friend. That gives us the
privilege of helping you, if we can.”

Wolf was in her mid-forties, perhaps, a handsome woman,
taller than Orca but with similar coloring: dark skin and very pale hair. The
handle of a knife strapped to her leg projected through the split side seam of
her cutoffs, in easy reach.

“You’d better hear what happened, first,”
Radu said.

He told her everything.

“Now I see why my daughter asked if I were feeling
revolutionary,” Wolf said when Radu had finished.

“Will it come to that?” Radu asked. “Would
they attack you, to make me go back?” He felt a deep distress at the
possibility of involving the divers in warfare.

“If they do, they’ll use very diplomatic
violence. We keep our fights on a high plane these days.” She smiled; the
resemblance between her and her daughter became that much more striking.
“Now let me ask you something. Do you truly believe your employers would
infect people with this disease, if you let them recreate it?”

“I don’t want to believe it,” Radu said.
“But all their questioning led in that direction. And they wouldn’t
tell me what they meant to do. I was afraid that if I waited too long, I
wouldn’t be able to stop them if that was what they planned.”

Wolf nibbled on her fingernail, deep in thought, and
remained silent most of the rest of the trip.

o0o

While waiting all day to catch a shuttle, Laenea had plenty
of time to think. The administration had no real reason to schedule this
exploratory trip so soon, and the haste with which it had been arranged insured
that it would be poorly organized and result in little useful information.
Laenea was anxious to return to transit, but she did not let the administrators
use her eagerness or her joy to erase her suspicions.

Radu was still missing; Orca had vanished into the sea. Even
Marc remained unavailable. He had set his analogue to answering his phone, and
the analogue had years of experience at courteously refusing to reply to
questions. Laenea was the only link to Radu the administrators had left, and
she had no doubt that they wanted him back. It seemed likely to her that they
hoped Radu would perceive that she had entered seventh again, fear that she was
once more in danger, and give himself away.

But she let her employers think she believed what they told
her about exploration and knowledge. She had two reasons. First, she believed
she had at least as good a chance of warning Radu as of betraying him.

Second — and perhaps Vasili Nikolaievich was right;
perhaps she
was
brutally selfish — Laenea could not bear to be out
of transit any longer.

o0o

As Wolf had said it would, the blimp reached Harmony by
midnight. Radu guided the airship to a meadow on the crest of the island.
Several divers grabbed its trailing lines and drew it to the mast; others came
running with bags of sand to heave into the ballast compartments. Soon the
blimp rolled in a gentle, narrow arc, swinging back and forth in erratic wind
currents. Wolf and Radu climbed down.

To his surprise, Orca waited for him on the ground.

“Welcome to Harmony,” she said to Radu.
“Hi,
loup-chérie,
” she said to her mother, giving her a
quick embrace. She hugged Radu tightly. Instead of the bright, metal-scaled
clothing she wore on shipboard, she had on a pair of faded blue cutoffs like
everyone else. She still wore her red deck shoes.

“I’m very grateful to you,” Radu said.

“We haven’t done anything yet. You’d
better wait and see if we can be of any help.”

Just being among people he felt he could trust, people who
had no motive to deceive him or bend him to their will, was the greatest help
he could wish for right now. Just being in a real place, a place not
constructed, artificial, controlled, made him happy.

“How did you get here so fast?” Radu said.
“Do you ride the killer whales?”

Orca laughed. “No. They hate it when you do that. Mom
sent the seaplane for us.” She introduced her brother, who stood back
shyly in the shadows. He resembled Orca closely, and he was naked; he did not
even carry the knife belt most of the other divers wore next to their skin.

“I’m glad to see you survived the flight,”
Wolf said smiling.

“As well as I ever do.”

“I liked it,” Mark said. “I’d like
to learn to fly a plane. What’s flying a blimp like?”

“I’d be glad to show you, if we get a
chance,” Radu said.

“Forgive me,
mes petites
,” Wolf said.
“I’ll leave you. Radu, you’ll have to excuse us if
we’re a bit distracted tonight.” She gripped his upper arm in a
welcoming gesture and vanished into the darkness. Mark stayed with them a moment,
then suddenly said, “I have some things to do, too. See you later,”
and disappeared.