Pilots had the reputation of being not completely stable. Radu had never paid the idea much attention. He did not know why talented people often fostered rumors of madness; truly insane people were unpleasant to be around. The only pilot Radu knew at all closely was Laenea Trevelyan, and she was exceptionally sane. Vasili was a bit eccentric, surely, but — mad? Radu tried to dismiss the pilot’s threat to kill him. No one had ever threatened him before. Back on Twilight, people lucky enough to escape the plague had resented him for contracting it and recovering. He was marked by his scars, and some people hated him for living while their own families died. But even in grief and fury, no one back home had ever threatened his life.
The suicide pills remained on the table in the crew lounge. Radu picked up the vial, threw it down the disposal, and tried to persuade himself that he was not afraid of the pilot.
o0o
As Vasili Nikolaievich predicted, when the ship surfaced from transit, Radu did not die. He did not even notice the transition. He was sitting in the lounge, bored and tired but still unwilling to allow himself to sleep. For no good reason he was afraid to give up his consciousness, however naturally.
Once in a while he glanced at the port, but the dead gray expanse, never mysterious, grew tedious. He began to ignore it; he began deliberately to avoid looking at it. But when he nearly fell asleep and roused himself, startled and disoriented and searching wildly for the fragments of another dissolving dream, he stared around the room and his gaze stopped at the port. Space had returned, normal space and a pattern of widely scattered stars. Earth, very close, blue and white and brown, loomed lazily above.
The door opened behind him. Radu faced Vasili Nikolaievich, who nodded once without smiling. As he turned away, Radu took a step forward.
“I want to call Laenea,” he said.
“You can’t.”
“You have no right —”
“You can’t, because she’s out on her first transit flight.” Vasili Nikolaievich closed himself into the control room alone.
The tension Radu had been under for so long drained slowly away. Between exhaustion, hunger, and the three different sleep drugs he had taken, he felt shaky and nauseated. His slashed wrist ached fiercely.
He wished his dreams of Laenea in distress would fade away and vanish in the way of most dreams, but this they refused to do. Nothing would make him feel easy about her safety until she returned and he could speak to her. His nightmares, the hallucinations he remembered from Twilight, and Atna’s vision all twisted together, mixing reality and fantasy. Atna’s premonition of danger had too many connections to everything that had happened for Radu to be able to dismiss it so easily anymore.
He felt trapped and uncertain, helpless to confront important matters, yet confronted by the trivial chores of preparing the ship for its return to Earthstation. He cursed, and got to work.
As the other chamber cycled Orca back toward life, Radu returned resentfully to his own body box and cleaned up after himself where he had retched. In the bathroom he washed his hands and splashed cold water on his face.
Did you expect the pilot to wipe up your vomit? he asked himself sarcastically.
As he prepared a quick breakfast — they would not have time for anything more — he drank a mug of coffee, wondering if the caffeine would make him sick. But it helped.
When he heard Orca trying to get up, he hurried to her side and helped her out. Her fingers were cold, the translucent swimming webs nearly colorless. He hugged her, stroking her neck, rubbing her sides and back to warm her. She shivered violently.
“Damn,” she said. Her teeth chattered. She hugged Radu tightly, leaning her forehead against his chest. “I feel awful.”
“It’s all right. We’re only two hours out from earth.”
He held her until her shivering subsided.
Orca laughed shakily. “Thanks. I’m okay now.” She drew away from him, embarrassed. “I never reacted like that before.”
Radu kept on lightly stroking her arms, for she did not look fully recovered.
“Did something happen?” she asked. “Do you feel any different than usual?”
“No,” he said automatically, then, trying to take back the lie, “well, yes. It was more uncomfortable to wake up this time.” That, at least, was an accurate statement. He wanted to tell her the truth, but he was afraid to. He did not want to see the same look in her eyes that he had seen in the pilot’s.
“I’m glad Atna stayed home,” Orca said. “That was a hard dive. I don’t know what it would have done to him. I think he was right to be afraid.”
“Yes,” Radu said slowly, reluctantly. “Yes. His vision was correct.”
Orca went below to check out the transit engines and prepare the ship for refueling. Radu tuned in a data signal from Earthstation, then, without waiting for the information to arrive, reset the clocks in the lounge. He had been reprimanded once for doing a reset before checking local time. The senior crew member had not bothered to notice that his reset was accurate. The record of a data signal contact saved trouble.
The ship had been out six weeks earth subjective time. It would dock well within the deadline for the bonus. Vasili might even be able to rejoin his exploration team.
Now that he had a moment to himself in the control room, Radu tried to call Laenea, hoping she had returned since Vasili asked about her. But her ship was still out. As far as he could tell, it was an even bet whether he or Laenea had been awake in transit first.
He hoped she had found it more interesting than he had.
She had been gone for quite a while. Radu wondered just how long training flights were meant to be. He tried to put off his worry by reminding himself that time in transit, at superluminal speeds, had no correlation with time in Einsteinian space, where all travel was slower than the speed of light. Against the six weeks that had passed on earth, Radu counted that the normal space segment of the trip to Ngthummulun had taken less than forty-eight hours, and he had been awake in transit barely a day.
Radu watered and fed the life-support system. Both the instruments and his own senses indicated that the catalyzed photosynthesis was performing with efficiency.
“What do you plan to do?”
Radu started at Vasili’s sudden appearance.
“I don’t know,” Radu said. “I’d planned to find another automated ship and go back out again, but —”
“You can’t fly on an automated ship anymore. You’ll blast it out of transit every time.”
“I realize that!”
“Tell me something. Do you dislike me in particular, or pilots in general?”
“Neither,” Radu said. “It’s only that I react to pilots the same way pilots react to normal people when they’re too near.”
“What!”
Radu shrugged.
“I never heard of that happening before,” Vasili said.
Radu sighed. The last thing he wanted was to be told something else about himself that was unusual.
“You’ll have to stay here,” the pilot said.
“On Earthstation? Why?”
“You can go to earth if you want. But you can’t go any farther without the cooperation of a pilot, and no pilot will let you fly until we’ve decided what to do with you.”
“Vasili Nikolaievich,” Radu said, trying to keep his tone reasonable, “something very odd has happened. We need to talk to the administrators about it —”
The pilot strode toward him with such fury that Radu backed up a step.
“And then what? If you ever got away from them — if they don’t take your brain apart cell by cell to find out what makes it work —”
Radu felt no inclination whatever to laugh at the ludicrous idea.
“— you’d still have to ship out with a pilot. And if you betray us…” He let his words trail off. The threat was all the stronger for only being implied.
“Pilot, I’m not your enemy. I’m not your rival. We ought to find out if anyone else is like me. I could have caused our ship to be lost — maybe this is what happened to other lost ships.”
“What to do isn’t your decision.”
“I think that it is.”
“If you say anything to anyone without the consent of the pilots, you’ll regret it.”
Radu gazed down at him. “You know,” he said suddenly, “Atna’s premonition was right.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Vasili said. He turned abruptly and left the room.
Radu swore under his breath. Losing his temper was a bad mistake: Now he had complicated matters even worse. And it had been completely unnecessary to remind Vasili of Atna’s warning. He did not even know why he had done it.
Orca climbed up from the engine room and slammed the hatch shut.
“What was that all about?”
Radu hesitated, wondering how much she had heard. He had to put aside the temptation to retract his earlier lie and explain everything. But that would put Orca in danger to no purpose.
“Vasili Nikolaievich was just... making clear the relative status of pilots and crew.” Almost worse than telling a lie was inventing such a feeble one.
Orca glanced at him quizzically, but if she had more questions she kept them to herself.
o0o
The ship docked at Earthstation. Before the last remnants of artificial gravity faded and the radial acceleration of the satellite took over, the chief marketing agent from Ngthummulun banged energetically on the outer hatch. Radu opened it, and the agent bounded in.
“I’m amazed at your speed,” she said. “And very pleased.” She grabbed Vasili’s hand and pumped it. Looking extremely uncomfortable, the pilot extricated himself as quickly as possible.
“I’ve credited your accounts,” the agent said cheerfully, not even noticing Vasili’s distress. “I have a certain amount of authority in determining the bonuses, which I’ve used.”
Radu felt too tired to react. Besides, most of his pay went directly to Twilight’s account; he never even saw it. Vasili muttered something and returned his attention to the message flowing in above the controls.
Orca gave both Vasili and Radu a disgusted look. She gripped the agent’s hand warmly. “We appreciate it. Thank you. Radu will have your cargo module freed up and ready for transfer in a couple of minutes.”
Radu heard a subtle “or else” in her tone.
“Fine,” the agent said. “I have space reserved on the four o’clock shuttle — I may just make it.” She clasped Orca’s hand again, and hurried off as quickly as she had arrived.
Orca swung around on Radu and Vasili. She folded her arms across her chest. “That was about as rude a performance as I ever saw,” she said. “I don’t care how mad you are at each other — or why. It’s no excuse for the way you behaved to her.”
Radu stared at the deck. Vasili looked over his shoulder at Orca, then turned away again.
Orca made a sharp noise of irritation and anger and strode out of the room. Her shoes made no noise, but the engine room hatch clanged loudly when she threw it open, and again when she banged it shut.
At that moment Vasili snarled a curse and jumped to his feet, plunged out of the control room and into his cabin, and slammed his door behind him.
Radu stood alone, upset, angry, and confused. He glanced over at the control panel, where Vasili’s message hung fading in the air. Perhaps he was invading Vasili’s privacy, but before it disappeared, he read it. Then he understood the pilot’s reaction. He had been replaced on the exploration team, and even though it was not scheduled to leave for several days, his request for reinstatement had been turned down.
Orca and Radu worked apart and in silence, Radu transferring the cargo module and shutting down the ship, Orca finishing with the engines. When he was less than halfway done, Radu heard Vasili leave. The pilot had no obligation to stay, no captain’s duty to help his own crew or to turn the ship over to its next users.
By the time Radu finished work, he felt groggy. He gingerly opened the hatch to the engine room.
“Orca? Can I help?”
She climbed up the ladder. “No, I’m all done.” She sat on the edge of the hatchway, rubbed her eyes, and yawned.
“You were right,” Radu said. “About the way I behaved, I mean. I’m sorry.”
“Most of those agents are such sharks, we ought to at least be civil to the ones who act human.”
“Vasili had an excuse,” Radu said. “He was waiting for the reply for his x team.”
“Did he get it?”
“They turned him down.”
She snorted. “He didn’t really expect them to give it back to him, did he?”
“I think that he did.”
“Radu, the administrators do as little as possible to interfere with their profits.” She stood up, stretched, and dogged the hatch shut. “They never change anything that works, even for the chance to do it better. Vaska’s broken the elapsed time record for every round trip he’s ever piloted. He can’t earn express bonuses for the transit authority if he’s off exploring.”
“But he’d be helping find new planets —”
“They don’t make as much as you’d expect off new worlds. They can’t claim them, they can’t own them. They wouldn’t even look for them if there weren’t a subsidy and a reward.”
“But they gave Vasili the assignment at first —”
“And he never got to go on it, did he?”
“That’s a very cynical way to look at things,” Radu said.
“Tell me that again after you’ve been on the crew a little longer,” she said.
He would have liked to point out an explanation for the sequence of events that had some more altruistic structure behind it, but he could come up with nothing better than coincidence and bureaucratic thoughtlessness.
“You look like I feel,” Orca said, “and I feel like hell. Let’s get out of here.”
In the locker room, Orca held a wyuna up to the light, gazed into it, and put it in her duffel bag. Then she stuffed clothing, bright wrinkled bits of gold and metallic rainbows, in on top. Subjectively the trip had been so short that a change of clothes had hardly been necessary. Radu retrieved his other shirt from the cleaner and flung it into his bag.
They left the ship and checked into Earthstation. Their accounts were, as promised, credited with a substantial bonus, and Radu’s was already debited with a transfer of funds to Twilight’s trade balance. He wondered if his contribution made even a blip in the debt his world had incurred as a result of the plague.
Radu glanced at the shuttle schedule when Orca called it up. No seats were available until the next day. Radu clenched his fist around the handle of his duffel bag. All he wanted was to get away from Earthstation, away from the pilots, to a place where he could think.
Orca made a reservation for herself; Radu reserved a place and put his name on the waiting list for any opening, to any landing port. Orca wanted to go to North America Northwest, but for Radu it held too many memories of Laenea. He would prefer to go elsewhere.
He and Orca stepped onto the moving ramp that led to the station’s crew section.
“Are you going out again?” Orca asked.
“Not immediately,” Radu said. “And you?”
“No. My family’s having a… a meeting. I promised to go if I possibly could.”
“Where do you live?”
“In the Strait of Georgia. Do you know where that is?”
“Approximately.” He had studied the areas around the landing platforms before his first trip down; he had chosen North America Northwest because the climate seemed most like Twilight’s. But he had never seen the mainland or the inland waters that lay east of the port; he had never even left the artificial island.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “When I’m gone, I do miss it. I even miss my family.” She grinned ruefully. “When I’m home, I don’t get along with some of them all that well.”
Perhaps that explained why Orca, a diver, was working on the crew. He had wanted to ask her, but it was the custom, on Twilight and most colony worlds, to be satisfied with the information people volunteered about themselves. Besides, if Radu questioned Orca she could do the same to him, with the right to expect an answer. He could give whatever lame explanations he pleased about his home world’s need for hard currency, but he preferred to keep to himself his real reasons for leaving. And his reasons for staying on earth right now he could not talk about.
Radu and Orca stepped off the ramp and through the entrance into the crew sector.
Six pilots stood in a semicircle waiting for them. Ignoring the diver, they stared at Radu. At one end of the line, Vasili Nikolaievich watched Radu coldly, as if they had never met, as if they had never spoken together civilly. Orca took Radu’s hand. He grasped her long, strong fingers gratefully.
She stepped hesitantly forward. Repressing an urge to pull her back and flee, Radu followed. The pilots stayed in their unwavering line — and they were all pilots: Only Vasili among them did not show a scar.
“Hello, Vaska,” Orca said to him. He did not move or speak or look at her; he simply kept staring at Radu.
“Vasili Nikolaievich, I promise you —” Radu cut off his words when the pilot’s expression hardened from warning to anger.
“You’re to come with us,” Vasili said, and, to Orca, “You’ve had your chances. Your presence won’t be required.”
“Who says?” Still holding Radu’s hand, pulling him along behind her, Orca shouldered her way forward.
“Don’t make trouble, Orca,” one of the other pilots said. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Oh? What does it have to do with? What the hell is going on?” She did not even slow down.
The pilots turned and moved with them, surrounding them again, closing in.
Radu felt his pulse quickening. He hoped it was only fear, but as the circle finished forming his heart began to pound, clenching in his chest like something trapped, sending his blood in a rush through his veins, so fast that his vision dimmed in a scarlet haze and a phantom wind roared in his ears. He stumbled after Orca, trying to calm himself, but his control was gone. He could no more slow his pulse and lower his blood pressure than he could grow a pair of wings and glide from Earthstation to earth itself. He walked faster — he tried to run but almost fell — and the pilots kept up easily. Orca glanced back at him. Radu could not speak. They were only a short way from a common room, where they would find other crew and station personnel. Radu set himself to get that far. Surely, in so public a setting, the pilots would have to leave him alone.
He stumbled again. His knee hit the metal floor hard and his fingers slipped from Orca’s hand. He knelt, gasping for breath, his heart laboring. He could hear nothing but the roar of his pulse. There was nothing to hear. He raised his head slowly. The pilots stared down at him, still without speaking, fading in and out through his obscured vision.
Orca tried to hold him up. He heard her, very far away, shouting.
“Call a doctor! Damn you all, will you help!”
Radu collapsed, but the diver kept him from falling and eased him to the deck. He felt cold metal against his back, against his quivering hands. The lights above him stretched away in infinite glowing lines. He felt the vibrations of footsteps through the floor and flung his arm across his eyes. He did not want to see the pilots gazing down at him, willing him to die.
Then, almost imperceptibly, his heartbeat slowed. The pain clamped around his chest lessened, and he could breathe more easily. He let his arm fall to his side and opened his eyes. Orca knelt beside him, bending over him with her fingers at the angle of his jaw.
The pilots were gone.
“Don’t move,” Orca said. “I’ll get help.”
Somehow he managed to grasp her wrist before she stood.
“No, wait.” He stopped to catch his breath. He could only fill his lungs halfway, and his fingers trembled feebly.
“You’re having a heart attack!”
Radu shook his head. “It was… something else.”
Orca frowned. “You’re nuts, I’m calling somebody. I’d’ve done it before only I was afraid you’d need resuscitation.”
Radu had an overpowering urge to laugh, which made him gasp and giggle weakly.
“What the hell is so funny?”
“A diver knowing how to give artificial respiration.” He laughed again.
“We’re not the only people in the water,” she said, “and sometimes the landers get into trouble. Good gods, who cares? Lie down.” She started away.
Radu’s laughter trailed off, but he pushed himself up and tried to stand. Orca’s spangled jacket slipped from his shoulders where she had thrown it. His fingers felt numb; he had to concentrate to make them grasp it. Orca heard him, stopped, and turned back. He held her jacket out to her.
Watching him, worried, she took it and absently slipped on. She glanced down. There was a run in her sleeveless knitted shirt, where the gold thread had parted and the fabric unraveled in a line up her ribs and the side of her small breast. She jerked the front edges of the jacket together, hiding the flaw in irritation.
“You’re all right?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“I react badly to pilots. I don’t understand why. I think it’s getting worse.”
“Did they know? Did they do it deliberately?”
“I guess they did.” He had, after all, told Vasili Nikolaievich.
“What did they want?”
“They wanted… to convince me not to tell anyone what they want.”
She scowled at him. “All right. Forget it.” She turned and started away. He tried to follow, but stumbled and nearly fell. She caught him and slipped his arm over her shoulders to let him lean on her. “Come on.”
Radu would not have gotten very far without her. She helped him along to the station’s section of small crew rooms. Finding an empty cubicle, she unlatched the door, got him inside, and eased him down on the narrow bed.
“Want your boots off?”
“I can do it.” He bent his knee, drawing one foot toward his hands as he lay flat on the hard mattress. He did not feel as if he could sit up again.
“Don’t be stupid.” Orca grasped his boot and pulled.
“Be careful of your hands —”
Orca gave the boot a solid jerk and it slid off. She dropped it and held up her hand, spreading her fingers so the translucent webbing showed.
“I know it looks fragile,” she said. “But it isn’t. It’s very tough.” Then she showed him a long, jagged scar between the second and third fingers of her left hand. “And it heals fast when something does happen.” She grabbed his other boot and pulled it off. “Besides, it doesn’t make that much difference swimming.”
“Then why do you have it?” he asked, surprised.
“Because when people thought about what divers would be like, even before anybody could create us, they always imagined us looking like this. So that’s how they designed us. We decided to stay this way.”
“Are your feet like that too?” Radu never would have asked such a question if he were not so tired. He blushed. “I’m sorry —”
“I have foldover toes, like a platypus,” she said. “With webs between.” Then she grinned. “No, my feet are pretty much the same as anybody’s, except for the nails. Want to see?”
He nodded, curious, and glad she was not offended by his prying.
“There’s nothing secret about being a diver, you know.” She sat on the edge of his bed, pulled off her red canvas shoes, and wiggled her toes. They were long, but not abnormally so, and they were not appreciably webbed.
Radu pushed himself up on one elbow and took her foot in his other hand. Her toenails were like claws, cat claws, tiger claws, retractable and heavy and quit sharp. Orca flexed her foot and the claws extended. One dimpled the flesh of his hand, very gently.
“Good protection,” she said. “You need it sometimes, in the sea. They aren’t much against sharks, but then there aren’t many dangerous sharks where I live.” She retracted her claws and reached for her shoes.
Radu lay back on the bed as she stood up.
“Do you think they’ll come after you again?” she asked abruptly.
Radu shook his head. “I don’t know.” His reasoning was none too clear right now; he did not want to think about pilots. He could not. Surrounded by normal space-time, he wanted only to sleep.
Orca stood gazing at the closed door, silhouetted against its dirty white surface. She shrugged, an action more like shaking off doubt than expressing it, and put her hand up against the panel to seal the room against outside intrusion. She turned around.
“I’m not so recently out of the water that I think this is a clever line. But I don’t want to leave you alone tonight, and to tell you the truth I’m not anxious to be alone myself. Do you mind if I stay?”
“No,” Radu said. “Of course not.”
She kicked off her shoes again and dropped her spangled jacket on the floor. “Is there room? Not that there’s much difference between floors and beds in these places.”
“There’s plenty of room.” Radu moved over and Orca lay down beside him, between him and the door. He was as glad of her company as he was grateful for her concern.
She smelled like no one he had ever been close to before, cool and salty, like the sea’s morning mist. He wondered if he smelled, to her, like forest or earth or alien ground.
“Lights out, please,” Radu said. The lights obeyed, leaving the room completely dark.
Radu lay in the narrow bed for nearly an hour, unable to rest, trying not to toss and turn.
“You can’t sleep,” Orca said softly.
“No. How did you know? Did I wake you?”
“I can see you,” Orca said.
“It’s pitch dark in here,” Radu said. That was one of the few things Radu did not like about being in space. Interior rooms, rooms with no windows, were as lightless as caves. He turned his head toward the sound of Orca’s voice, but he could see nothing of her, not even the glint of her pale, fine hair. The scarlet pattern of the blood vessels in his retinas flickered against blackness.
“For you it’s dark,” she said. “Not for me. You don’t know much about divers, do you?”
“Only that they have foldover toes, like a platypus,” he said. “With webs between.”
Orca chuckled and dug her claws gently into the heavy fabric of his pants. He heard the quick pricking sound, but her talons never touched his skin.
“No,” he said, more seriously. “I only know what you’ve told me.”
“We see farther into the infrared, and farther into the violet, than humans do.”
“Don’t you consider yourself still human?”
“My father would say no,” she said.
“What would you say?”
She hesitated. “I’d say we were more different than a race, but less different than a separate species. We’re a transition phase.”
“A transition to what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and to Radu she sounded very sad.
“What’s the matter?” He slid his hand up her arm to her shoulder, to her throat, to her face. He touched her cheek in the darkness and brushed the tears with his fingertips. “Orca, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know what we’re changing to. I’m not sure I want to know.”
“But it’s all speculation, it’s all generations away.”
“Not for us,” she said. “We didn’t become divers by natural evolution. There’s no reason to slow down to that rate now.”
“Oh.” Radu felt embarrassed by his own ignorance. “Of course. Your next generation could be different.”
“Or I could.”
“You —?“
“That’s what the meeting’s about. To decide if we should change. The techniques are easy enough. You figure out what you want, build the DNA, construct a series of carrier viruses, sensitize yourself to them —” Radu felt her shrug. “You feel like you have the flu for a few days, while the virus replicates. Then you’re well, the new genes are integrated, and they slowly change you to fit.”
Radu suddenly shuddered.
“Hey,” Orca said. “It’s not bad at all, not really. The process itself is trivial. I’ve done it myself, a couple of times. But just for little things. The big ones scare me, but they won’t turn us into Frankenstein monsters.”
“Of course not, I’m sorry — I don’t know why I reacted like that. Have you ever had an experience, and in the middle of it suddenly felt you’d gone through it before, exactly as it was happening?”
“Sure. Déjà vu, it’s called. It’s just a trick your mind plays on you, like an echo. Crossed axons.”
“I suppose,” Radu said. “Whatever it was, it made me understand why you feel wary of the changes you might have to undergo.”
“I wouldn’t have to,” she said. “It would be my choice. But if I didn’t, and everyone else did…”
She stopped.
“You’d be left behind,” Radu said finally. “Whatever it was your family was going to, you’d be left behind.”
Orca nodded against his shoulder, then held him in silence for some time.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said. Her voice was easy again, full of her usual good humor. “Tell me about Twilight. What did you do before this, or did you join the crew straight out of school?”
“We never formally go to school,” Radu said. “But we never formally leave it, either. There aren’t enough people on Twilight for many of us to spend all our time studying. So we do that, and other things too. I liked geology, so I went on surveys every summer from the time I was old enough to be more asset than liability, first with a group and later by myself. Everybody does everything on Twilight, more or less. I helped in my clan’s nursery, and built houses, and I piloted one of the blimps —”
Orca made a strange noise. “Something wrong?”
“A blimp?”
“Don’t you like blimps?”
“The only thing I like less than blimps is boats.”
“But why?”
“Because with a boat you can’t see what’s under you. It’s like driving a ground car down the road with your eyes and ears covered.”
“That doesn’t explain why you don’t like blimps.”
“You’ll laugh,” she said.
“That’s possible,” Radu said. “I could use a good laugh right now.”
Orca chuckled again. “Get ready for one, then. I get airsick. I get seasick even worse.”
Radu did laugh. Orca was not offended, because she laughed, too.
“Most divers don’t like boats,” she said. “You need a lot of equipment to find out things that you can learn underwater by giving one good shout and listening carefully.”
“What about blimps?” Radu said.
“As far as I know,” she said, “I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t like blimps.”
“The only person in several worlds, I think. I got to fly ours for only one season because the waiting list to take it over was so long.” Suddenly he yawned.
“Me, too,” Orca said.
Tentatively each put an arm around the other, and then they slept.
o0o
Radu struggled up out of dreams that, instead of being distinct and vivid, were jumbled and muddy, mixing Laenea and transit and homesickness and fear. He sat bolt upright, staring in the darkness toward the door, expecting it to open and reveal a line of pilots beyond.
He pushed the paranoid thought away, muttered for the lights, and looked around the tiny windowless room. Orca was gone. He was disappointed, and rather surprised, but he could hardly blame her.
Using the communications terminal in the room, he checked the status of Laenea’s transit ship. It was still out. He frowned, and rechecked, but the display gave no additional information. He shut it off.
Combing his hair with his fingers and shedding his clothes behind him, he went into the minuscule bathroom.
No one on Twilight would have taken as long or as hot a shower as he indulged in. He did not even feel guilty about it.
Earthstation has plenty of water, he thought. It has plenty of power. I know that. But that isn’t why I’m standing here with luxurious amounts of water running wasted between my toes. It’s because I’m changing. I’m coming to expect what this life has to offer. And I like it.
But he disliked that realization.
When Radu came out again, more relaxed but no closer than before to knowing what he should do, Orca was sitting crosslegged on the rumpled bed with breakfast spread out before her. Radu stepped back, reaching for a towel.
“I’ve seen naked people before,” Orca said. “We hardly ever even wear clothes at home. Come and eat.”
He wrapped himself up in the towel before he came out.
“I thought you’d left,” he said.
“I did. But I came back.”
“I mean permanently.”
She stopped smiling. “I thought about it.”
Radu sat on the edge of the bed. “It probably would have been better if you had.”
Orca handed him a piece of fruit and began unwrapping elegantly folded paper parcels.
“You’re determined not to accept any help, aren’t you?”
Radu took a cautious bite of the round yellow-green fruit. It was tart and sweet.
“This is very good,” he said. “What is it?”
“An apple,” Orca said impatiently.
Radu took another bite, and started to comment again on the taste, but Orca’s expression made him think better of any more dissembling.
“I’m sorry you’ve been involved,” he said. “If I knew anything you could do I’d accept your help gladly. But the truth is I don’t understand what’s happened myself, or what I can do about it.”
“Oh, come on. This is what you were arguing with Vaska about, back on the ship, wasn’t it? As for that little production last night — you were scared, gods know so was I, but you weren’t surprised.”
“I’d be doing you an injury if I told you everything,” Radu said. “I’d be putting you in considerable danger.”
“Look, Radu, we’re crew. We don’t give that up when we leave the ship.”
“It would be stupid to endanger you any more!”
She shrugged. “I’m in about as deep as I can be. They’ll assume I know anything you know.”
Of course she was right. If the pilots saw him as a sufficient threat, they would have to believe Orca was dangerous to them as well. It would not be safe for them to leave her alone.
“You’ll have to tell them you don’t,” he said. “They know how to detect the truth —”
“They wouldn’t even bother to try. Divers learn biocontrol as well as pilots do. Better, in some ways. We can neutralize stress so it doesn’t even show. I could pretend to lie — but I can’t prove it if I’m telling the truth.”
Radu rubbed his face with one hand. “It’s pointless,” he said. “Simply pointless.”
Orca crumpled a piece of wrapping paper slowly and very tightly, and dropped the wad on the bed.