Laenea followed Ramona to a small cubicle supplied with voice recorder, writing and drawing terminal, even paper, pens, pencils, and a set of paints.
“What you’re to do is record your impressions and your experience of transit in whatever way is most comfortable for you,” Ramona said. She spoke quite formally. “If you prefer some other medium, you need only ask, and I will have the materials brought to you. Afterwards, we can talk about it, and you’ll be free to look at the records all the rest of us have made. Do you have any questions?”
“I guess not.”
Ramona nodded and left her alone, closing the door behind her.
“I’ll speak,” Laenea said.
“Ready,” the recorder answered. A green light formed in the air. Laenea stared at it for a while. “I changed my mind,” she said. The light dissolved.
She stood, but the room was too small to pace in.
She sat at the terminal and began to type steadily and fast. After a while she lost track even of the erratic version of time pilots still could sense.
o0o
Orca followed Ramona to a second cubicle. The pilot opened the door to let the diver in.
“Orca,” she said, “if you would tell us something of your perceptions of what happened —? If you wish any other materials, you need only ask.”
The transit administrator waited in silence with a quizzical expression.
Orca let herself be closed inside a tiny room crammed full of recording equipment. She was not used to making permanent material records, or records by any mechanical means. The cousins remembered everything perfectly. True speech was ideal for telling stories, true and imaginary, though the distinction meant less to cetaceans than to human beings.
Orca wondered if Ramona’s offer of other materials extended as far as a filled swimming pool. She suspected not — but then again, who knew? She sang a few words of middle speech, but when she played it back, it sounded all wrong, artificial, outlandish, and stilted. The description of the edge would have to wait. She had no answers for Ramona’s questions yet. But she had a question that Ramona might answer, or might, at least, want to think about. She erased the recording, started it again, and said, “What’s beyond where we were?”
o0o
“Radu,” Ramona said, “do you understand what we hope to learn from you?”
Radu nodded, but he was glad she did not ask him if he would be able to fulfill her hopes.
“Ramona,” van de Graaf said, “why are you debriefing the crew?”
“You are asking me the wrong question, Kri,” Ramona said. “The question you should be asking me is how we found the lost ship. More accurately, who found it.”
As Radu closed the door of the cubicle, he heard the doctor say, “Ramona, I think…” She stopped, and had to start again. “I think you’d better tell me just what the hell happened out there.”
In the silence of the closed room, Radu faced the banks of machines. He sat down, picked up the pencil, chewed on its end, and scrawled a few disconnected words in his unpracticed handwriting: trees after rain, crystals, the texture of fish swimming upstream. Then he rubbed out what he had written. The paper tore. He threw it away and faced a second empty sheet. He thought of making up words, but even if he could do it, they would be only random collections of letters to anyone but him. And without definitions, without a way to set the meanings in his mind, they soon would dissolve to randomness even for him. He threw away the second sheet of paper, which had not a mark on it.
He tried the door. It remained shut, so he knocked. He felt as if he had just attempted to take a test he had known all along that he would fail.
Ramona-Teresa opened the door.
“I can’t,” Radu said. “I haven’t anything to say about it. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind,” she said, with far more understanding than he ever expected. “It’s all right.”
“I thought you’d be angry.”
“How can I be angry at you for not being able to do something I couldn’t do myself?” She stood aside to let him into the corridor. “Yours is hardly a unique reaction.”
Taking over for Ramona-Teresa, Dr. van de Graaf left Radu at the clinic, where a technician told him to strip and then carried away his clothes.
The battery of physical examinations he had to take was more rigorous and more tedious than what he had passed to join the crew. He remembered Laenea’s reaction to her experiences in the hospital: “undignified.” That was certainly true. He supposed Laenea and Orca were undergoing the same exams, but he saw neither of them, nor, indeed, anyone else he knew.
Twelve hours later, Radu had begun to understand why Laenea, when he first met her, had been so determined to stay out of the hospital. He felt exhausted and trapped. He wished he could get out, out anywhere, down to earth or back home, or even outside Earthstation in a field suit. Somewhere beyond the region of artificial colonies and space stations lived beings who had started out human but, generations ago, deliberately changed to something else. They could live in vacuum, on barren rock, on the shores of molten lakes. Radu was as strange as they — or at least that was how he felt right now — but they were free. He envied them. He was bored and so exhausted he could barely think straight.
He tried to endure what was demanded of him, but when another technician — he never saw the same one twice — left him naked and without a word of explanation in a cubicle that had no windows, no viewscreens or terminals, not even any books, he began to lose his temper. He tried the door, but it had neither knob nor interior controls. He knocked. No one replied. He pressed his hand hard against the door’s surface and tried to slide it open. That, too, failed.
It occurred to him that they might be watching him — spying on him — and he refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing him panic. He sat down. He let his hands lie relaxed on his knees, and waited.
Can they spy on my mind as well as my body? he wondered.
Not by telepathy, of course — he still did not believe it existed. (Yet he thought: Laenea, can you hear me? and tried to project the question to her, but received no response.) It would be ridiculous to suspect the administrators of keeping some mental freak hidden away to report what other people thought. (Yet he formed a rude image in his mind; and then he wondered: How did Atnaterta know something would go wrong? How did I know where Laenea was?)
If the administrators could spy on his mind, it would be a matter of machines: sensitive recorders of electromagnetic activity, of nerve pulses and chemical changes, of the movements of his eyes.
Radu sat very still, and sought tranquility.
Another hour passed with exquisite sloth. Radu wished he could put aside his time-sense for a while, so he could pretend the time was hours on hours, even days. That was what it felt like.
When the door of his cubicle finally did open, Radu had made some decisions.
Dr. van de Graaf stepped inside and let the door close behind her.
“I have some questions to ask you,” she said.
It was one thing to endure standing naked in front of a panel of anonymous physicians, quite another to be interrogated by one of his employers while stripped to the skin. The doctor had not even troubled to change to physician’s garb; she was here in her position of transit administrator, not surgeon.
“I would appreciate having my clothes,” Radu said.
“You’d just have to take them off again. There’s another series of tests we need to have the results of.”
The dismissal kindled the spark of anger that had been growing in Radu since all this began.
“I want my clothes,” he said again, “and I want to leave. You have no right to keep me here.”
The tone of her voice changed only a little, but it altered her manner abruptly from transparent affability to superficial courtesy backed by steel.
“On the contrary,” she said. “The contract that you signed, that we signed, gave us the responsibility to treat you for any disabilities you incur in transit.”
“I’m not disabled.”
“That’s a matter of opinion. All the evidence we’ve collected till now indicates that it would be unsafe for you ever to fly again.”
Radu started to object, but van de Graaf cut him off.
“Until we find out if that’s true, if you left here without my permission, you’d be in breach of contract with the transit authority. That in itself would make it impossible for you to work on the crew again.”
“What makes you think I want to, after all this?”
“You have very little choice.”
“I’ve had other jobs besides housekeeping duty on a starship.”
“I’m sure you have. Do you have a work permit, too?”
“What is that?”
“A document that permits you to work,” van de Graaf said.
Radu bristled at the sarcasm. “You need permission to work on earth? That’s a stupid system.”
“Perhaps. But without a permit you can’t get a job. Not on earth, not in Earthstation. No one will hire you. No one can hire you. And there’d be no means of paying you.”
“I’ve lived most of my life without money —”
“On a colony world,” van de Graaf said patiently. “Radu Dracul, you’re in a more complex society now. You can’t go out and forage on a space station. It’s true that back on earth, a great deal of land has been allowed to return to wilderness. But the wild areas are very strictly controlled. No one may enter them without permission.”
Radu looked down at his bare hands, his bare knees.
“You don’t understand that it isn’t necessary to close me in on all sides until I cannot move or see or breathe,” he said. “I’m as anxious as you to understand what happened to me. It did happen to me, but no one will say a word to me about what you have discovered.”
Van de Graaf hesitated, then sat nearby, crossed her left leg over her right, and rested her right hand on her left ankle.
“You’re right, of course,” she said. She made her tone placating, and her voice much kinder. “Perhaps the difficulty is that we’ve yet to discover anything.”
Radu waited, disbelieving.
“You’re unique in our experience, but so far, physically, there’s nothing to distinguish you from the usual range of human beings. The range includes ordinary people who experimented with transit, most of whom died.”
Radu waited for her to go on, but the silence continued, stretching tautly between them.
“Do you think I can explain what happened?” Radu said. “I know less about it than you do. If I’m not unique then the obvious explanation is that other normal people could survive transit as well as I did.”
“That may be true — though I doubt it but I’m not willing to experiment with people’s lives, at least not until we’ve explored other possibilities.”
“I’m not opposed to cooperating with you —” Radu said.
“Good,” van de Graaf said dryly.
“ — but I want to know the purpose of what you’re doing. I’m tired, and I’m tired of being treated as if I’m not even here.”
That finally produced a reaction: The doctor looked at him as if he really were here.
“Will you accept my apology?” she said. “What’s happened has put us all into quite a state of confusion. Things aren’t running as smoothly as I’d like. But I will instruct the technicians to explain the purpose of each procedure. I’d like you to take just one more test, a neurological examination, then answer a few questions. After that, I’ll try to answer your questions. Is that acceptable?”
“If —”
Van de Graaf’s laugh was both sympathetic and charming. “If you can have some clothes. Of course.”
Van de Graaf was as good as her word: The technician who came in brought a gown for Radu to wear. He even explained what was going on.
“The nerve scan is like making a giant circuit diagram of the nervous system,” he said. “After I record the data I feed it into the computer, which does a statistical analysis to compare the way your brain cells interact with each other and with the rest of your body’s nerve fibers. Then we look at your profile against the average.”
“How often do you find differences?”
“Oh, always,” the technician said cheerfully. “I’ve never seen anybody who matched the average exactly. But the differences can tell a lot.”
Radu submitted to the scan.
After that, they finally did give him back his clothes.
They gave him Dr. van de Graaf’s few questions, too; they turned out to be a long, computer-based interrogation. The voice that spoke to him was, unlike most machine speech, so monotonous and hypnotic as to be, at times, nearly incomprehensible. At first Radu could answer most of the questions without thinking about them. He drifted in and out of paying attention. But the voice probed further and further into his past until it returned him to Twilight, to the plague. He wished he could answer those questions without thought.
The voice stopped abruptly. A few minutes later van de Graaf came in.
“I appreciate your patience,” she said sincerely.
Radu was too tired to protest any more; he was so tired he even felt grateful to be treated with simple courtesy.
“Never mind,” he said.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” she said. “Tell me about your childhood on Twilight.”
“It was the same as anybody else’s,” he said. “The same as that of anyone from a colony world, I imagine. You learn how to do everything adequately, and you’re an expert at nothing.”
“You’d say you were unexceptional?”
“Completely.”
“What do you remember about having the plague?”
“Almost nothing. I remember Laenea —”
“Laenea!”
“Yes. She was on the emergency ship. Its whole crew landed and helped us. Didn’t you know?”
“No. That’s very interesting. Do you remember anyone else?”
“No. When the ship arrived I had just fallen ill. All I remember is that Laenea helped me. I would have died otherwise.”
“What about afterwards? Did you feel changed?”
“I was changed,” he said. “My whole family died. I buried them with my own hands. That changes you.” He touched the scars on his cheeks with his fingertips. “And I’m marked. Anyone from Twilight knows immediately that I had the plague and recovered.”
“Before you found Laenea, did you ever believe you could communicate with people in an inexplicable way?”
Radu hesitated, but this was no time to rewrite his history the way he wished it to be. He told van de Graaf about the hallucinations.
“And you consider this an unexceptional childhood?”
“It wasn’t my childhood,” he said. “It only happened a few times, just before I got sick. It may actually have been hallucinations.”
She changed the subject abruptly. “Do you happen to know the plague’s incubation period?”
“It’s about six weeks,” he said. “What has that got to do with anything?”
“Oh,” she said, “probably nothing at all.”
Before he could decide whether the offhand tone was a deliberate attempt to distract him from his question, her eyelids flickered in the way Radu had learned to associate with transmission by internal communicator. He waited for the administrator to return.
The idea of being able to link up with an enormous pool of databases intrigued Radu, but not quite enough to overcome the visceral revulsion he felt at the idea of having a machine implanted in his brain. A small machine, true, mostly biological and barely the size of his little fingernail. Still he preferred not to submit to it. He suspected that if he had been accepted for pilot’s training he would not have been able to go through with that operation, either, even for Laenea’s sake.
The administrator opened her eyes and regarded Radu curiously.
“Did you say you knew other people who contracted the plague and recovered?”
“Not exactly. I said I didn’t know any but I’m sure there must be some.”
“There aren’t.”
“… What?”
“The records don’t show any.”
“No one was thinking about keeping records.”
“True. But the census they took a couple of years later should have found other people like you, if there were any, and it didn’t.”
“There must be some,” Radu said. “The records must be wrong.”
Van de Graaf gazed at him speculatively, thoughtfully. “Perhaps,” she said. “Or perhaps you really are unique.” She stood up. “Come along.”
She took him to a small lounge where the others were already waiting. Radu was very glad to see Orca; she was the only unambiguously friendly person he knew right now. He trusted neither the administrators nor the pilots. When Laenea smiled at him, he realized with distress that he was not even certain he trusted her.
“If you’d all come with me, please,” van de Graaf said. She had an amazing facility for giving orders with the phrasing of requests.
She took them through secured doors toward the main body of Earthstation. The narrow, deserted hallway exactly paralleled the main corridors of the space station. Since returning from transit, Radu had neither seen nor spoken to anyone who was not in some way under the control of the transit authority. The secret hallway brought this fact to his conscious attention: He and the others were being kept isolated.
“Did you know these halls were here?” he asked Orca in an undertone.
“I never thought about it,” she said. “But if I had, I would have suspected they were.”
“Why are we being kept hidden?”
“The transit administrators like publicity if it’s completely positive. Anything that’s negative, or ambiguous, they try to avoid. You, my friend, are definitely ambiguous.”
At the rim of the station they entered a twelve-ship shuttle extension. The long, wide dock was eerily deserted: blocked off, Radu supposed, from those inquisitive eyes of ambiguous publicity.
At the hatch of a shuttle, Orca stopped short.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Where are you planning to take us?”
“Back to earth,” van de Graaf said.
“Very funny,” Orca snapped. “Landing where?”
“White Sands.”
“I can’t land at White Sands.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have no intention of being arrested and interned as a prisoner of war. Surely you know my family has never made peace with the United States government?”
After a moment of incomprehension, van de Graaf said, “Oh. I’d forgotten all about that. Surely, in an emergency —”
“No! Even if they promised me free passage I wouldn’t believe them. Besides, I’d be in trouble with my own people if I accepted it.”
“We all have more important things to think about than ancient history.”
“Do you think this is some kind of joke?” Orca said angrily. “It may be ancient history to you, but my family has an even longer memory than the U.S. Navy — and the U.S. Navy blows us out of the water whenever they have a chance. They still consider us traitors, if not spies.”
“I’ll get you a world council safe-conduct on the way down—”
“Let me explain this to you in terms you may understand, doctor,” Orca said. “Not landing in the United States is in my contract.”
Radu could not help it: He laughed. Van de Graaf turned toward him, outraged, and Orca glared.
“Wait,” he said, trying to explain. He dissolved into laughter again. “Doctor, how can you argue with her?” he said after he managed to catch his breath. “That’s exactly the threat you’ve been holding over me!”
Orca’s anger changed to amusement and she started laughing, too.
“Kri, for heavens’ sake,” Ramona said. “We can as easily land at Northwest. There’s no reason to put Orca in a compromising position.”
“White Sands is more secure.”
Ramona snorted. “Up until now it’s been convenient to let you administrators indulge yourselves with your passion for secrecy, but no longer. I’ll take the responsibility and fly the shuttle in myself, if you prefer.”
“No,” Kri said. “The responsibility is mine. We’ll land at Northwest. But it’ll be a zoo there by the time we get down.” She glanced at the hatch and it swung open. “Will you all please get on board?”
They complied, entering a shuttle the likes of which Radu had never seen. It was as opulent as Kathell Stafford’s apartment, though not quite as gaudy. Radu’s boots sank deep into the carpet, the leather of the seats glowed with care and polishing, and a bar stretched all the way across the back wall of the passenger compartment.
“Is this how pilots travel?” Orca said to Laenea.
“If it is, nobody ever told me,” Laenea said.
“Orca, you know very well we fly on the same shuttles as everyone else.” Ramona-Teresa sat down and fastened her seat belt. She turned toward Kri. “Or almost everyone else. Just exactly who does use this one?”
Kri shrugged. “VIPs, usually.”
Orca laughed. “I thought pilots were the VIPs,” she said.
“Apparently not,” Vasili Nikolaievich said.
Radu felt a little sorry for the young pilot, who had experienced so many affronts to his pride and his self-confidence in the past few days. This was simply one more insult, perhaps all the worse for its being, to Radu’s mind, so trivial.
They felt a mild vibration as the ship undocked from the space station and accelerated gently toward earth.
Orca leaned back and stretched. “That was some day,” she said.
“Not one I’d care to repeat.” Radu slumped down in his seat.
“We’ll probably have to, though, you know,” she said. “Unless they found out what they wanted to about you.”
“I don’t think they did.” He wished he knew more about what they had found out about him. Van de Graaf’s interest in Twilight’s plague troubled him deeply.
Orca grinned. “They discovered I’m not quite human.” She laughed. “I don’t think any of the techs ever had a diver to work on before. One of them was as nervous as a barracuda. He must be one of those nuts who believes they can catch the carrier virus.” She bared her prominent canine teeth, then giggled. “Just like an old movie — zap! Transformed into a were-fish!”
Radu turned toward her, stunned by her chance remark. Orca stopped laughing.
“Radu,” she said, “good gods, that can’t happen. You can’t change without being sensitized, and you can’t even be sensitized until —”
“No, no, it isn’t that,” he said. “But you made me realize…” He stopped, suspicious, and lowered his voice to a bare whisper. “If I told you something… might other people be listening?”
She glanced around the shuttle. No one was paying any attention to their conversation.
“I haven’t any reason to suspect the place is bugged,” she said. “But I haven’t any proof it isn’t, either, so I guess the only safe assumption is that they can listen to us.”
“I need to talk to you. I need to tell you what I think they want. Perhaps — if I’m lucky — you can tell me I’m crazy. But not here.”
Orca nodded and took his hand between hers. The swimming webs slid across his skin like warm silk.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll find a place to talk when we get down, when we get out of here.”