Superluminal (42 page)

Barefoot, she picked her way among the beach stones. It was
getting on toward evening. In the shade of the trees it was cool, and inside
her cabin it was chilly. She plunged into the shower. The sun-warmed water
splashed over her. After a few minutes she stopped shivering.

Toweling her short straight hair, she turned the heat on
under the kettle for a warm drink.

“J.D.?”

She started and wrapped the towel around her.

“Zev, you’re so quiet. You scared me.”

“I never meant to.” The diver stood in the doorway. Fine
white-gold hair clothed his mahogany body in a translucent sheen. He looked
awkward, seeking her out on land. She felt awkward, talking to him when she did
not have any clothes on. That was strange, because she swam naked with him and
his family, divers and orcas alike.

“Sit down, excuse me a minute.” She turned her back and took
a last swipe with the towel beneath her heavy breasts, then pulled on a shirt
and a pair of baggy black pants.

“I thought to find you in the sea,” Zev said.

J.D. deliberately finished tying the drawstring. “I hoped to
find you there. But I can’t stay in the water forever.”

“We were talking,” he said. He lowered his gaze and glanced
at her sideways, with an expression both mischievous and shy. “We sometimes
talk for a long time.”

“I’ve noticed that.” On the solar stove, the kettle steamed.
Being in a wilderness area, the cabin had to be rustic. It contained no
electronics beyond her web link. Nothing operated by voice-activation. Now that
she knew how everything worked, it amused her to remember how long it took her
to figure out all the mechanical switches. But it had not been very funny at
the time.

“Do you want a hot drink? I’m cold, and my fingers and toes
are shriveled up like prunes.”

Zev looked at his own hands, turning them over, spreading
his fingers, stretching out the translucent swimming webs.

“My fingers never do that,” he said. “Why not?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” J.D. said. “Physiology isn’t
one of my specialties. Don’t you know?”

“We are different,” he said.

“That’s for sure.” The kettle hissed. “What did you decide?
Do you want some tea, or maybe some cocoa?”

“Some ice cream?” he said.

J.D. laughed. “Sure.”

He perched on the window seat, his knees pulled up, his feet
apart, completely unconscious of his nakedness. When she first met him she wondered
about his gender, for he had no external genitals. His people had engineered
their basically human bodies into a more streamlined form: male genitals drawn
inside, female breasts small and flat. Both genders possessed a layer of
subcutaneous fat that burned away during any long underwater exertion, leaving
the individual ethereal and with an appetite like a shark. Zev always amazed
her with how much he could eat. She made herself some tea, gave him a dish of
ice cream, and sat on the rag rug in a patch of sunlight. She still felt cold.
She sipped her tea, glad of its sweet spicy warmth.

“What was your family talking about?” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “You, of course. That was why we did not
invite you out today.”

“I don’t see that it would have made much difference,” she
said, “since I can’t understand your language yet.”

“You will never begin to understand true speech, as you are.”
He spoke quite matter-of-factly. “I will never understand it completely,
either. But the next generation will.”

If there is one, J.D. thought, but she kept her silence. She
found the idea intolerable, that the divers might be permitted — or encouraged
— to die out. It was all too possible, if the new administration acted on its
prejudice against genetic engineering.

“Besides,” Zev said, “it is rude to talk about someone in
front of them when they cannot understand. Is that right?”

“That’s right. Some people would say it’s rude to talk about
someone behind her back, though, too.”

“Oh. We did not know. We did not mean to be rude.” He
hesitated. “J.D.?”

“Yes?”

“When
is
it polite to
talk about someone?”

“Good question,” she said. “Anytime they don’t know it, I guess.”

“That is strange.”

“Yes, it is,” J.D. said. “But never mind. Everybody does it,
anyway. What did you say about me? Or can you tell me?”

“No one said I should not. But perhaps you would rather have
a surprise.”

“I’d rather know.”

“It is all right, then.” He put down the empty ice cream
bowl. “We played and talked. Some said you were strange, swimming masked
against the sea.”

I might as well have stayed in the city, J.D. thought. The
divers aren’t the only people who think I’m strange.

“But I said you felt the sea as well as any diver, and would
feel it more deeply when you could dispense with your machines.”

Zev moved his hands like waves. Underwater the divers
communicated by sound, and by touch when they were close enough. On land they
retained the very human quality of adding to their speech with gestures.

“We are aware that we know things you would like to
understand. And we all agreed that you know a large number of things about
which we have fallen into ignorance.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” J.D. said.

“My family thinks it is too bad that you are still entirely
human. Many of us wonder if you have considered changing your nature.”

J.D. clenched her hands around the mug of tea, oblivious to
its heat.

“J.D.?” Zev said. “I
have
surprised you. I did not mean to. Are you angry?”

“Not angry,” she said. “Stunned. Zev... all I ever hoped for
was that you’d invite me to stay in the open water — that you’d give me
permission to bring my boat so I wouldn’t have to come back to the cabin every
evening. What you’ve asked me is more than I dreamed. Is it possible?”

“Of course,” he said. “You have visited our lab. We know
what to do. We were never born from human and orca, as some say. Nor did people
throw little children into the ocean and say, ‘Swim, grow fins and extra lungs!’
We chose our creation, like all changelings.”

“I know where divers came from — but no one’s gone from human
to diver in a generation,” J.D. said. “Where are you going to get the biotechs?”

“My family has resources.”

J.D. blew on her tea and sipped from the cooling surface,
taking time to think.

What Zev offered her was attractive. It was also illegal.
Even before becoming U.S. president last fall, Senator Distler had repeatedly
sponsored a bill to force the divers to change back into ordinary humans. J.D.
feared that now, as president, he might be able to force the bill through Congress.
The divers had few vocal supporters, and they employed no lobbyists. It would
be terrible public relations for the government if it rounded them up and
forced them to undergo reversion against their will. That might be the divers’
only protection. After all, any individual could decide to revert at any time.
The divers chose to remain as they were.

As far as Distler and his supporters were concerned,
preventing genetic diseases was one thing, changing the human species something
quite different. The enthusiasm for human engineering had peaked and faded
rapidly, leaving a sizable group of divers and a few other changelings. Only
the divers had increased their numbers.

“How will you decide?” Zev asked.

“I don’t know,” J.D. said slowly. “I feel like saying yes
without even thinking about it. But I should think about it.”

“But
how
will you
decide? With divers, the whole family plays and talks. Then we decide. Will you
go to your family and talk with them? Will you play? You should play more, J.D.”

She laughed, though Zev’s was a perfectly serious comment.

“My family — ” She started to describe her family,
half-siblings, half-parents, step-siblings, step-parents, dispersed and
recombined. It was an unusual family even in these modern times.

“My family never swims together,” she said, and left it at
that. “This is a decision I’ll have to make by myself. May I have some time?”

“My mother will talk to you tomorrow,” Zev said. “That will
be the real invitation. But I think... you will have to decide quickly.”

That was the last thing she had expected Zev to say. She had
never known the divers to make an important decision in haste.

“Why?”

“I cannot tell you,” Zev said. He scooped up the melted ice
cream on the bottom of the bowl with his finger and licked the chocolate from
his knuckle and from the swimming web. He stood up. “Thank you for the ice
cream.”

“You’re welcome.”

He crossed to her and hugged her, holding her close. He was
shorter than she. He laid his head on her shoulder, and the curls of his pale
hair tickled her skin just below the hollow of her throat. J.D. put her arms
around Zev, giving him a big-sisterly pat on the shoulder. On land the heat of
his body was even more noticeable than in the water.

He sighed deeply and stroked her breast. Startled, she put
her hand on his, moved his fingers, and drew away.

“What is wrong?”

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“But why? We touch each other when we’re swimming.”

“It’s different on land, Zev. In the sea it’s just playing.
On land, touching is more serious.”

“Oh,” he said. “You see? We need you, to tell us these
things that we have forgotten, so we will not forget everything about living on
land.”

His semi-retractile claws clicked on the linoleum, then his
feet scrunched in the gravel of the beach. He moved with a languorous grace, as
if he were already in the water. He waded through the gentle surf. The water
rose around his legs. When it reached his hips he breast-stroked forward and
vanished. The waves obliterated the ripple he left behind.

Each wave reached a handsbreadth higher on the beach. J.D.
watched the tide come in. Her tea grew cold.

The invitation gave her more than one decision to make.
Accepting it would completely change her life. She would be able to resurrect
her career, though she would have to restrict its focus to a single blended
society. The story of the integration of the divers with the orcas deserved to
be told. If she accepted, she would be in a position to tell it.

I should have accepted on the spot, J.D. thought.

She could not come up with a single good reason to refuse — aside,
of course, from the fact that she could be put in jail for becoming a
changeling. This frightened her more than she cared to admit. She had been
raised to obey authority, not defy it.

This is the best chance you’re ever going to have to
practice your profession, she told herself. If your application to
Starfarer
hadn’t been rejected, things might be
different. But you were turned down. And, anyway, why should human contact with
aliens off the Earth be more important than human contact with the beings that
live on the same world, and still are alien to us?

The change in her life would include her form. She would
become not only a chronicler of the divers, but a diver herself. Somewhere,
somehow, the divers would obtain the sensitizing virus, and the changing
viruses; they would inoculate her with the one, then with the others. As the
changing viruses spread through her body and integrated themselves into her
genes, she would begin to change.

She imagined her lungs enlarging, altering, the tissue of one
lobe of each transmuting into a substance like the artificial lung. In that
respect the divers differed from other marine mammals: they
could
breathe underwater, absorbing oxygen
directly from the sea.

She would dispense with the metabolic enhancer, because her
body would gain the ability to accelerate into a more efficient state.
Spreading her strong square hands, she imagined swimming webs between her
fingers. She imagined her light complexion darkening to protect her from
exposure to the sun, and wondered if her brown hair would pale to gold or red.

She curled her toes to feel phantom claws extending, scratching
the floor. Her breasts were heavier and her hips wider than any diver’s, and
her imagination failed when she tried to think of her body changing to resemble
their sleek shape. She wondered if her breasts would shrink and flatten, if her
hips would narrow, if the changing virus could alter even a person’s bone
structure.

The idea of the change both frightened and intrigued her.

She wondered what her family would say. They would not
object. Her dad might make one of his offhand remarks, so dry that J.D. often
found herself laughing before she realized what was funny, so offbeat she could
not imagine what it would be.

The shadows of the Douglas firs lengthened across the beach
and pierced the water with their tips. The breeze freshened. J.D. felt cold
again, as if she had never really been warm.

She had to give herself time before deciding. So many
factors came into the mix. The opportunity of joining a group of beings that
she loved, of telling their story, had to be balanced against the possibility —
indeed the probability — that academic colleagues would no longer take
seriously the work of a researcher who had, in the old-fashioned phrase, gone
native.

And she had to face the legal question of making the change.

Perhaps a few years ago it would not have mattered. It was
possible that even now, no one would notice. But if they did, the current
fashion of despising science and technology would cause her a great deal of
trouble. And that did worry her.

So did Zev’s uncharacteristic reluctance to tell her why she
would have to make her choice so quickly.

The sun set. Darkness crept into the cabin.

Needing the familiarity of simple actions, J.D. put her teacup
in the sink, puttered around straightening up the cabin, and, for the first
time all day, asked her web link for mail and messages and the day’s report.