Superluminal Read online

  A day went by in which she saw neither the rain that passed, nor the sunset that was obscured by fog. She asked again when she could leave the hospital. The answers were evasions. She allowed herself to become angry, and still no one would respond.

  Evening, back in her room: Laenea was wide awake. She lay in bed and slid her fingers across her collarbone, down to the sternum, along the shiny red line of the long scar. It was still tender, covered with translucent synthetic skin, crossed once just below her breasts with a wide bandage to ease her cracked ribs.

  The efficient new heart intrigued her. She consciously slowed its pace, then went through the exercise of constricting and dilating arteries and capillaries. Her biocontrol was excellent. It had to be, or she would not have been approved for surgery.

  Slowing the pump should have produced a pleasant lethargy and eventual sleep, but adrenaline from her anger lingered and she did not want to rest. Nor did she want a sleeping pill. She was done with taking drugs. Dreamless drug sleep was the worst kind of all. Fear built up, undischarged by fantasy, producing a great and formless tension.

  The twilight was the texture of gray watered silk, opaque and irregular. The hospital’s pastels turned cold and mysterious. Laenea threw off the sheet. She was strong again; she was healed. She had undergone a year of training, major surgery, and these final days of boredom to free herself from biological rhythms. There was no reason in the world why she should sleep, like others, when darkness fell.

  The hospital retained a few advantages of civilization. Her clothes were in the closet, not squirreled away in some locked room. She put on black pants, soft leather boots, and a shiny leather vest that laced up the front, leaving her arms and neck bare. The gap between the laces revealed the livid pilot’s scar from one sharp tip at her throat to the other below her breastbone.

  To avoid arguments, she waited until the corridor was deserted. Green paint, meant to be soothing, had gone flat and ugly with age. Her boots were silent on the resilient tile, but in the hollow shaft of the fire stairs the heels clattered against concrete, echoing past her and back. Her legs were tired when she reached bottom. She speeded the flow of blood.

  Outside, mist obscured the stars. The moon had risen, full and haloed. Streetlights spread Laenea’s shadow out around her like the spokes of a wheel.

  A rank of electric cars waited at the corner, tethered like horses in an old movie. She slid her credit key into a lock to release one painted like a turtle, an apt analogy. She got in and drove it toward the waterfront. The little beast rolled along, its motor humming quietly on the flat, straining in low gear on the steep downgrades. Laenea relaxed and wished she were back in space, but her imagination could not stretch that far. The turtle could not become a starship; and the city, while pleasant, was of unrelieved ordinariness compared to the alien places she had seen. She could not, of course, imagine transit, for it was beyond imagination. Language or mind was insufficient. Transit had never been described.

  The waterfront was shabby, dirty, magnetic. Laenea knew she could find acquaintances nearby, but she did not want to stay in the city. She returned the turtle to a stanchion and retrieved her credit key to halt the tally against her account.

  The night had grown cold; she noticed the change peripherally as fog, and cobblestones slick with condensation. The public market, ramshackle and shored up, littered here and there with wilted vegetables, was deserted. People passed as shadows.

  A man moved up behind her while she was in the dim region between two streetlamps. “Hey,” he said, “how about —” His tone was belligerent with inexperience or insecurity or fear. Looking down at him, surprised, Laenea laughed. “Poor fool —” He scuttled away like a crab. After a moment of vague pity and amusement, Laenea forgot him. She shivered. Her ears were ringing and her chest ached from the cold.

  Small shops nestled between bars and cheap restaurants. Laenea entered one for the warmth. It was very dim, darker than the street, high ceilinged and deep, so narrow she could have touched both side walls by stretching out her arms. She did not. She hunched her shoulders and the ache receded slightly.

  “May I help you?”

  Like one of the shop’s indistinct masses brought to life, a small ancient man appeared. He was dressed in ill-matched clothes, part of his own wares. Hung up like trophies, feathers and wide hats and beads covered the walls of the secondhand clothing store. Laenea moved farther inside.

  “Ah, pilot,” the old man said, “you honor me.”

  Laenea’s delight was childish in its intensity. He was the first person outside the hospital, in the real world, to call her by her new title.

  “It’s cold by the water,” she said. Some graciousness or apology was due, for she had no intention of buying anything.

  “A coat? No, a cloak!” he exclaimed. “A cloak would be set off well by a person of your stature.” He turned; his dark form disappeared among the piles and racks of clothes. Laenea saw bright beads and spangles, a quick flash of gold lamé, and wondered uncharitably what dreadful theater costume he would choose. But he held up a long swath of black, lined with scarlet. Laenea had planned to thank him and demur; despite herself she reached out. Velvet silk outside and smooth satin silk within caressed her fingers. The cloak had a single shoulder cape and a clasp of carved jet. Though heavy, it draped easily and gracefully. She slung it over her shoulders, and it flowed around her almost to her ankles.

  “Exquisite,” the shopkeeper said. He beckoned and she approached. A dim and pitted full-length mirror stood against the wall beyond him. Bronze patches marred its face where the silver had peeled away. Laenea liked the way the cape looked. She folded its edges so the scarlet lining showed, so her throat and the upper curve of her breasts and the tip of the scar were exposed. She shook back her hair.

  “Not quite that,” she said, smiling. She was too tall and big-boned for delicacy. She had a widow’s peak and high cheekbones, but her jaw was strong and square.

  “It does not please you.” He sounded downcast. Laenea could not quite place his faint accent.

  “It does,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

  He bowed her toward the front of the shop, and she took out her credit key.

  “No, no, pilot,” he said. “Not that.”

  Laenea raised one eyebrow. A few shops on the waterfront accepted only cash, retaining an illicit flavor in a time when almost any activity was legal. But few even of those select establishments would refuse the credit of a crew member or a pilot.

  “I have no cash,” Laenea said. She had stopped carrying it years ago, since the time she found in various pockets three coins of metal, one of plastic, one of wood, a pleasingly atavistic animal claw (or excellent duplicate), and a boxed bit of organic matter that would have been forbidden on earth fifty years before. Laenea never expected to revisit at least three of the worlds the currency represented.

  “No cash,” he said. “It is yours, pilot. Only —” He glanced up. His eyes were very dark and deep, hopeful, expectant. “Only tell me, what is it like? What do you see?”

  He was the first person to ask her that question. People asked it often, of pilots. She had asked it herself, wordlessly after the first few times of silence and patient head-shakings. The pilots never answered. Machines could not answer, pilots could not answer. Or would not. The question was answerable only individually. Laenea felt sorry for the shopkeeper. She started to say she had not yet been in transit awake, that she was new, that she had only traveled in the crew, drugged near death to stay alive. But, finally, she could not say even that. It was too easy; it was an untrue truth. It implied she would tell him if she knew, while she did not know if she could or would. She shook her head; she smiled gently. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded sadly. “I should not have asked…”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I’m too old, you see. Too old for adventure. I came here so long ago… but the time, the time disappeared. I never knew what happened.
I’ve dreamed about it. Bad dreams…”

  “I understand. I was crew for ten years. We never knew what happened either.”

  “That would be worse, yes. Over and over again, no time between. But now you know.”

  “Pilots know,” Laenea agreed. She handed him the credit key. Though he still tried to refuse it, she insisted on paying.

  Hugging the cloak around her, Laenea stepped out into the fog. She fantasied that the shop would now disappear, like all legendary shops dispensing magic and cloaks of invisibility. But she did not look back, for everything a few paces away dissolved into grayness. In a small space around each low antique streetlamp, heat swirled the fog in wisps toward the sky.

  o0o

  The midnight ferry sped silently across the water, propelled through the waves by great silver sails. Wrapped in her cloak, Laenea was anonymous. She put her feet on the opposite bench, stretched, and gazed out the window into the darkness. Laenea could see her own reflection, and, beyond, the water. Light from the ferry wavered across the long low swells.

  o0o

  The spaceport was a huge, floating, artificial island. It gleamed in its own lights. The solar mirrors looked like the multiple compound eyes of a gigantic water insect, an illusion continued by the spidery reach of launching towers. The port’s other sea-level buildings curved like hills, like sand dunes, offering surfaces that might have been smoothed by the wind. Tall, angular buildings suitable to the mainland would have presented sail-like faces to the northwest storms.

  Overhead, a small, silver-blue blimp passed by, driven by quiet engines. Laenea remembered arriving once a few hours before a storm hit, when all the airships on the port launched simultaneously in a brilliant multicolored cloud and vanished toward the horizon to escape the weather.

  Beneath the platform, under a vibration-deadening lower layer, under the sea, lay the tripartite city. The roar of shuttles taking off and the scream of their return would drive mad anyone who long remained on the surface. Thus the northwest spaceport was far out to sea, away from cities, carrying a city within its underwater stabilizing shafts.

  The ferry furled its sails, slowed, and nestled against the ramp that met it at the waterline. Electric trucks hummed into motion, breaching the silence. Laenea moved stiffly down the stairs. Pausing by the gangway, watching the trucks roll past, she concentrated for a moment and felt the increase in her blood pressure. She could well understand how dangerous it might be, and how easily addictive the higher speed, driving her high until like a machine her body was burned out. But for now her energy began returning and the stiffness in her legs and back slowly seeped away.

  o0o

  Except for the trucks, which purred off quickly around the island’s perimeter and disappeared, the port was silent, so late at night. The passenger shuttle waited empty on its central rail. When Laenea entered, it sensed her, slid its doors shut, and accelerated. A pushbutton command halted it above stabilizer #3, which held quarantine, administration, and crew quarters. Laenea felt good, warm, and her vision sparkled bright and clear. She let the velvet cloak flow back across her shoulders, no longer needing its protection. She was alight with the expectation of seeing her friends, in her new avatar.

  The elevator led through the center of the stabilizer into the underwater city. Laenea rode it all the way to the bottom of the shaft, one of three that projected into the ocean far below the surface turbulence to hold the platform steady even through the most violent storms. The shafts maintained the island’s flotation level as well, pumping sea water into or out of the ballast tanks when a shuttle took off or landed or a ferry crept on board.

  The elevator doors opened into the foyer where a spiral staircase reached the lowest level, a bubble at the tip of the main shaft. The lounge was a comfortable cylindrical room, its walls all transparent, gazing out like a continuous eye into the deep sea. Floodlights cast a glow through the cold clear water, picking out the bright speedy forms of fish, large dark predators, scythe-mouthed sharks, the occasional graceful bow of a porpoise, the elegant black-and-white presence of a killer whale. As the radius of visibility increased, the light filtered through bluer and bluer, until finally, in violet, vague shapes eased back and forth with shy curiosity between dim illumination and complete darkness.

  The lounge, sculpted with structural foam, then carpeted, gave the illusion of being underwater, on the ocean floor itself, a part of the sea. It had been built originally as a public lounge, but was taken over by unconscious agreement among the starship people. Outsiders, gently ignored, felt unwelcome and soon departed. Journalists came infrequently, reacting to sensation or disaster. Human transit pilots had been a sensation, but the novelty had worn away. Laenea did not mind a bit.

  She took off her boots and left them by the stairwell. She recognized one of the other pairs: She would have been hard put not to recognize those boots after seeing them once. The scarlet leather was stupendously shined, embroidered with jewels, and inlaid with tiny liquid crystal disks that changed color with the temperature. Laenea smiled. Crew members made up for the dead time of transit in many different ways; one was to overdo all other aspects of their lives, and the most flamboyant of that group was Minoru.

  Walking barefoot in the deep carpet, between the hillocks and hollows of conversation pits, was like walking on the floor of a fantasy sea. Laenea wondered if the attraction of the lounge was its relation to the ocean, which still held mysteries as deep as any she would encounter in space or in transit. Laenea had often sat gazing through the shadowed water, dreaming. Pilots and divers could guess at the truth of her assumption.

  Near the transparent sea wall she saw Minoru, his black hair braided with scarlet and silver to his waist; tall Alannai hunched down to be closer to the others, the light on her skin like dark opal, glinting in her close-cropped hair like diamond dust; and pale, quiet Ruth, whose sparkling was rare but nova bright. Holding goblets or mugs, they sat sleepily conversing, and Laenea felt the comfort of a familiar scene.

  Minoru, facing her, looked up. She smiled, expecting him to call her name and fling out his arms, as he always did, with his ebullient greeting, showing to advantage the fringe and beadwork on his jacket. But he looked at her, straight on, silent, with an expression so blank that only the unlined long-lived youthfulness of his face could have held it. He whispered her name. Ruth glanced over her shoulder, saw Laenea, and smiled tentatively, as though she were afraid. Alannai unbent, and, head and shoulders above the others, raised her glass solemnly to Laenea. “Pilot,” she said, and drank, and hunched back down with her elbows on her sharp knees. Laenea stood above them, outside their circle, gazing down on three people whom she had kissed good-bye. Crew always said good-bye, for they slept through their voyages without any certainty that they would ever awaken. They lived in the cruel childhood prayer, “If I should die before I wake…”

  Laenea climbed down to them. The circle opened, but she remained outside it. She was as overwhelmed by uncertainty as her friends.

  “Sit with us,” Ruth said finally. Alannai and Minoru looked uneasy. Laenea sat down. The triangle between Ruth and Alannai and Minoru did not alter. Each of them was next to the other; Laenea was beside none of them.

  Ruth reached out, but her hand trembled. They all waited, and Laenea tried to think of words to reassure them, to affirm that she had not changed.

  “I came… ” But nothing she felt seemed right to tell them. She would not taunt them with her freedom. She took Ruth’s outstretched hand. “I came to say good-bye.” She embraced them and kissed them and climbed back to the main level. They had all been friends, but her friends accepted her no longer.

  The first pilots did not mingle with the crew, for the responsibility was great, the tensions greater. But Laenea had thought it would be different for her. She cared for Ruth and Minoru and Alannai. Her concern would remain when she watched them sleeping and ferried them from one island of light to the next. She tried to understand her friends’ r
eserve, and hoped perhaps they only needed time to get used to her.

  Conversations ebbed and flowed around her like the tides as she moved through the lounge. Seeing people she knew, she avoided them. Her pride exceeded her loneliness.

  She put aside the pain of her rejection. She felt self-contained and self-assured. When she recognized two pilots, sitting together, isolated, she approached them straightforwardly. She had flown with both of them, but never talked at length with either. They would accept her, or they would not: For the moment, she did not care. She flung back the cloak so they would know her. Without even thinking about it, she had dressed the way all pilots dressed. Laced vests or deeply cut gowns, transparent shirts, halters, all in one way or another revealed the long scar that marked their changes.

  Miikala and Ramona-Teresa sat facing each other, elbows on knees, talking together quietly, privately. Ramona-Teresa touched Miikala’s hand, and they both laughed softly. Even the rhythms of their conversation seemed alien to Laenea, though she could not hear their words. Like other people they communicated as much with their bodies and hands as with speech, but the nods and gestures clashed.

  Laenea wondered what pilots talked about. Certainly it could not be the ordinary concerns of ordinary people, the laundry, the shopping, a place to stay, a person, perhaps, to stay with. They would talk about… the experiences they alone had; they would talk about what they saw when all others must sleep near death or die.

  Human pilots withstood transit better than machine intelligence, but human pilots too were sometimes lost. Miikala and Ramona-Teresa were ten percent of all the pilots who survived from the first generation, ten percent of their own unique, evolving, almost self-contained society. They had proven time-independence successful by example; it was up to the pilots who came after, to Laenea, to prove it practical.

  As Laenea stopped on the edge of the pit above them, they fell silent and gazed solemnly up at her.