The spaceport was chaos.
Radu looked through the shuttle window. The landing strip was completely overrun. Half the people out there carried cameras, from miniature instant-prints to recorder-transmitters with their own antennae. Floodlights illuminated the area as brightly as day, but much more harshly. Shadows twisted across faces; light flared off lenses and news corporation logos.
The crowd spilled onto the runway while the shuttle was still moving. The craft turned a few degrees toward the blockhouse, rolled a few meters forward, stopped, pressed forward, stopped again. The wheel motors shut down abruptly, their whine fading into silence.
Banging open the hatch between cockpit and passenger compartment, the shuttle driver stepped through.
“Sacrificial lamb time,” she said. She sounded as if she had seen this sort of reaction before. “Any volunteers, or do you folks want to draw straws?”
Radu glanced out the window again. Several of the cameras pointed upward; others followed. He realized they were photographing him. Embarrassed, irritated, he drew back out of their range.
“No,” the driver was saying. “I can’t get any closer to the blockhouse until the runway clears. Unless you want some squashed pedestrians.”
“Not a bad idea,” Vasili said.
“Then you drive.”
Vasili shrugged and stayed where he was.
Ramona stood up. “They will not move until someone speaks to them,” she said.
“Wait,” van de Graaf said. Her eyelids flickered.
“Kri —”
She lifted one hand in the “please wait” gesture of someone using an internal communicator.
“I’ve asked for more security,” she said when she opened her eyes.
“Why bother?” Laenea said. “It never works.”
“One of us must talk to the people outside,” Ramona said again. She glanced at Vasili and Laenea. “Or we can go out together.”
“You’re on your own,” Vasili said.
Radu had an irrational desire to punch him; what worried him was that the recurring impulse was beginning to seem less and less irrational.
“But what should we tell them?” Laenea asked.
“The truth. There’s no reason to hide it.” She gestured to Radu, inviting him, or commanding him, to join them. “You, too, are part of this.”
Laenea dogged open the hatch. The crowd noise poured in. The stairs descended slowly toward the crowd. People pressed back, opening a small space, and one reporter leaped to catch the lowest rung and pull himself onto it. Laenea stepped out onto the platform. Radu hesitated.
“They’re only curious,” Ramona said.
“I’ve never seen so many people at once before,” Radu said.
He followed Ramona out onto the small upper landing. Reporters with cameras, already halfway up the stairs, began asking questions.
Ramona waited until the uproar quieted. The sea breeze ruffled her roan hair. Radu breathed the fresh air gratefully. He felt as if he had not taken a deep breath since Ngthummulun.
The older pilot’s voice carried, strong and clear.
“I know some of you,” she said. “Too often when we speak together it is because of tragedy. A friend has died, but his death was a natural one, and the sorrow should remain private. I want to speak to you instead of joy and discovery. The joy and the discovery are public.” She drew Laenea forward to stand beside her. “Laenea Trevelyan has done what the pilots have hoped to do since there were pilots. On her first training flight, she discovered the transit dimension which will open the universe beyond our galaxy.”
Silence dissolved in another rush of questions. Laenea and Ramona answered. Laenea’s discovery overshadowed the story of the lost ship that everyone had come to hear. Perhaps they assumed the discovery explained why Miikala’s ship stayed out so long. At any rate no one asked Radu anything. He wondered if Ramona-Teresa, understanding that Laenea was a hero while Radu was a freak, had planned it this way. He suspected that she had, and he was most grateful to her.
He admired her for her control of the crowd of reporters, gawkers, and passers-by. The force of her personality charmed them, much more than her status as one of the first pilots. She would have had the same effect on them if she were merely a politician or a street-corner haranguer. Though every word she spoke to them was the truth, she could easily have lied. They would have believed her.
Suddenly, Orca bolted past Radu and down the stairs.
“Orca!” Ramona shouted.
If Radu were to escape, even only long enough to tell Orca what he feared, now was the time —
At that moment Laenea plunged back into the shuttle, fighting for breath. She flung out her hands when Radu came toward her, roughly shrugging off his help.
“I’m all right,” she said, her voice short and rough. “Just — don’t — touch me.”
Radu obeyed, unwillingly. Laenea bent down, breathing hard.
“Vasili Nikolaievich!” Radu cried. “Come help Laenea, hurry, please!”
To Radu’s surprise, the young pilot, his expression and his posture as sulky as ever, appeared a moment later. He put one arm around Laenea’s shoulders.
“You can’t do anything for her anymore,” he said. “It’s other pilots she needs, now.” He led her farther into the shuttle. Radu watched them go, wanting to do something, knowing he was helpless.
Ramona-Teresa joined him a moment later.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. We… can’t even bear each other’s touch anymore.” He hesitated, then said, unwillingly, “You were right all along.”
“Perhaps,” she said, sounding distracted, and followed the others into the shuttle.
Radu was alone. He could not see where Orca had gone. The crowd had begun to disperse.
This might be the only chance he would get. With one last wistful glance after Laenea, Radu stepped out of the shuttle, hurried down the ladder, and lost himself among the spectators.
o0o
Constant, painful, beautiful dreams of outside filled Marc’s fugue state. When he recovered and reoriented himself in time and space, he knew he could not continue as he was. His pretty things no longer sufficed. They never had, though he had succeeded in distracting himself with them for years.
Exhausted, emaciated, and safe for a time from another attack, he came to himself again, and knew that he must change.
He fixed himself tea and broth and settled in to catch up on what had happened while he was gone.
Marc’s analogue had culled the messages from his informants, his news traces, and his database infiltrations. Marc’s sources of information were, as Radu Dracul had said, excellent. Radu’s problem was one to which he would have to set himself immediately. The analogue began the report on Laenea and Radu with reassurances: “Laenea is found again, but… ” and ended with a very human-sounding complaint that Marc had not troubled to mention Radu. Intrigued, Marc read the report.
The day after receiving Marc’s cautions, the young offworlder had shipped out, with not one but two pilots — so much for taking Marc’s advice — and with a crew member who was also a diver. Marc had wished to meet Orca for some time. He prized unique people even over unique things.
Marc had, over the years, acquired the habit of letting his attention wander. It passed the time more quickly than most activities, and often showed him connections he would not otherwise have seen. Now he reminded himself that time, which had not mattered to him for so long, mattered once more. He concentrated on the report.
Laenea’s ship, declared lost, had returned in the company of the craft that had taken Radu Dracul back into transit. Both ships had docked at Earthstation, and an unscheduled shuttle now sailed back toward earth. It would soon land on the Northwest port. Anyone with both access to a radar trace and any intuition, common sense, or curiosity could guess that the shuttle carried the people who had been on Laenea’s ship and on the rescue craft.
It should be very interesting up on deck.
Marc turned off his news collation, stood, and brushed his fingertips across the controls of the door between his chambers and the outside.
It was time for his exile to end.
Marc left his rooms, walked down the corridor, boarded the elevator, rode it to the surface, and stepped out on deck for the first time in many years. Everything he was doing, he was doing for the first time in many years. He dared not let himself react with much intensity.
He walked slowly toward the shuttle and the mass of people around it. He supported himself on his favorite stick, a long polished limb with a heavy growth of textured vine entwined around its length. Though he did not feel lame just now, he was shaky and agoraphobic, severely affected by the unaccustomed noise, the tumult, and the enormous space around him. His eyes were not used to focusing at such distances.
The air, though, the air: He had forgotten how fresh and good the air smelled out here on deck, even among the machines with their tang of fuel and lubricants and ozone.
The blockhouse lay like a silent island in a pool of illumination. The shuttle formed a promontory above a sea of people, lights, and shadows. Marc hobbled through the empty darkness separating them. He heard Ramona’s calm, certain voice, though he had not made out the question to which she was responding.
Laenea stood beside her, Radu Dracul a little behind them. Marc allowed himself a smile, but tried to check the joy he felt at seeing Laenea alive. Marc thought himself safe from a fit — the malfunctioning nerve cells seemed to require a period of recovery between episodes of misbehavior — but he preferred to minimize the risk by remaining calm.
He paused before he reached the edge of the crowd, reluctant to test himself against such a concentration of people. He glanced around, neither hoping for a break in the crush nor finding one. Only a single other person haunted the edge, as he did: a very young man, a boy, who might have been as old as fifteen. He was completely naked. He gazed up at the shuttle. Droplets of water glistened on his sleek body. His skin was the color of mahogany, and his hair, damp and plastered against his head, was so blond it looked like a silver helmet. He moved forward, his step hesitant. Light glowed through the tan pink webs of his hands.
A diver, Marc thought.
In the middle of answering a question, Laenea suddenly stopped, stepped back as if from a blow, turned, and vanished into the shuttle. Amid the murmur of surprise from the crowd, Ramona picked up the reply in midphrase.
Knowing how severely Laenea reacted to ordinaries, Marc pushed forward, trying to get to the stairs. But that was the aim of everyone else, too, and he immediately realized how foolish was his attempt. He found himself crushed between a tall reporter and a short massive camera operator. He tried to back up, too late. He lost his walking stick. He stumbled; he felt himself going down as if he were diving into a warm salty sea. The reporter tried to help him, but the current pulled her away. Someone else bumped him and he fell.
He was dragged across the deck; the sound of shoes and boots on metal overwhelmed even voices. The trembling began deep inside his body, and he curled himself up, thinking only, It can’t take me again, not so soon, not here among all these people.
Then he was dragged free, and the footsteps and voices receded. He lay on the deck, his arms around his head and his face hidden against his knees for protection. He peered out cautiously.
The blond dark boy, the naked diver, knelt motionless nearby, his hands, relaxed with webs and fingers spread, resting on his thighs. Marc had never read that divers had eyes any larger than the average, but the young man’s extraordinary black eyes were enormous.
Marc unfolded his long, gaunt body and sat up slowly, grateful for the cold sea breeze. He shivered, but the sensation was different altogether from the trembling that warned of a fugue.
“Are you injured?” the diver asked. “I thought they’d crushed you, when you fell.”
“Say I was knocked down, at least,” the older man said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be churlish. Thank you for helping me. Do you see my stick?”
The young diver glanced around, then got up and retrieved the cane, kicked aside at the edge of a spotlight’s shallow puddle of illumination. He brought it back to Marc.
“Are you a pilot?” he asked.
Marc touched the scars on his chest: two scars, not one, parallel to each other and close together, both scars old and faded to white.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore. Are you a diver?”
“Yes. My name is… Mark Harris.”
Marc smiled and extended his hand. “We should get along well, then. My name is Marc, too.”
o0o
Orca used her strength and her small size to get through the crowd, bulling her way past people, slipping between them, till she reached open space.
Her brother had freed himself and now knelt beside an older man, a grounder who, by the look of him, had come to some grief in the crowd.
Orca spoke her brother’s underwater name. In the air the long descriptive phonemic string came out a high-pitched garble, but he recognized it and spoke her name in reply.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I heard what happened. I was afraid for you.”
She had never thought to see him in the human world, and so close to so many landers. He was wary of them, yet he had come to help her without so much as a knife belt. Touched, she knelt and hugged him. He put his arms around her and nuzzled the hollow of her collarbone.
“I missed you,” he said softly, and drew away again. Orca squeezed his hand and let him go.
She heard the high-pitched descending whistle of a killer whale’s greeting. She answered as well as she could, but did not try to explain where she had been or what had happened. It would be difficult underwater; in the air she could not even make a start at it.
A half dozen port security officers came out of the blockhouse. They paused to assess the crowd and to curse, though rather good-naturedly, at the thought of trying to break it up without offending tourists or earning the wrath of reporters. Ramona had vanished inside the shuttle, so the spectators at the edge of the group were drifting away. The air of expectancy was fading. A network helicopter took off with its news crew; farther away, another information corporation’s microjet powered up with a sighing whine.
“This is my sister Orca,” her brother said to the older man.
“How do you do,” he said to her. “My name is also Marc.”
She did not have a chance to wonder what he meant by “also,” for he was trying to rise. He got to his knees and steadied himself with his stick; Orca helped him with a hand under his elbow.
The spot of warmth behind Orca’s eyes became tinged with red; she let the emergency message through.
This is van de Graaf. Where are you?
Right outside, Orca replied. If you look you can see me.
Is Radu with you?
No.
You should have stayed here. Now stay there. If you see him, keep him there, too. The rest of us will be out in a minute.
Without replying, Orca ceased to accept the transmission. Though the crowd had thinned it would be longer than a minute before anyone — any pilots, at least — got through it from the shuttle. Orca looked around for Radu, but did not see him.
She heard her cousins calling for her to return to the sea, welcoming her, curious as always about what she had done during her absence in the air.
“Go ahead,” her brother said. “I’ll stay here.”
“Wait —” Marc said.
Orca kicked off her shoes and her pants. “I’ll be right back,” she called, throwing off her vest and running for the edge of the port.
She dove. The sea closed in over her with an energizing shock. Air bubbles tickled past her body. She let her momentum carry her straight down, then swam even deeper. The conversations of her cousins showed her where they were. She was inside the delicate webbing of a three-dimensional sound net. Fifty meters underwater she arched her body and circled upward again.
Her metabolism accelerated to the higher rate. When she broke the surface she took a deep breath and felt the oxygen burning in her lungs. She dove again, humming to her cousins. Their dark shapes surrounded her. They brushed her with their bodies, their fins, their flukes, more gently than any human lover.
I’m glad you decided to come to the gathering, her closest cousin said.
I haven’t decided yet, Orca said. I came out to talk to you.
But how can you think of missing it?
You sound like father, Orca told her.
Her cousin’s laugh vibrated past, and then her cousin disguised her echo pattern so she really did sound like Orca’s father: His voice, his swimming patterns, his outline.
You must at least come to the gathering, she said in father’s voice, stern and self-satisfied, with a parodic note thrown in.
All the cousins and a few of the divers could do the same thing, a little, but her ability was uncanny.
Orca and her cousin both laughed, but Orca grew serious again very quickly.
I’m not that anxious to attend this meeting, she said.
But it will be fun.
You have a different idea of fun than I.
Aren’t you excited?
No, Orca said. I wish I were. I’m frightened, my dear friend, I can’t help it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to survive these changes.
Then you should come to the gathering and speak your mind about it.
You’re right, Orca said, Of course, you’re right. I’ll try. Whatever happens otherwise, I will try to come to the gathering.
Come now, her cousin said.
I can’t. I wish I could, but something has happened, something important.
Does it have to do with your friend the newborn?
Yes, Orca told the killer whale. He — she told them his name, a sound pattern that would immediately identify him to anyone who saw him or met him, and who spoke true speech — he took us to the edge of the universe.
The patterns the whales used for communication, the three-dimensional shapes, as transparent to sound as solid objects, could express any concept. Any concept except, perhaps, vacuum, infinity, nothingness so complete it would never become anything. The nearest way she could try to describe it was with silence. She expected them to be confused when she told them that she had gone, deliberately, to a place of silence, and that she would return to it if she could. She expected, not that they would be afraid for her, because they did not feel fear, but that they would be worried about her. The whales did know madness.
Her nearest cousin rubbed against her, spiraling around her in a warm embrace.
You have seen this, my cousin? Seen it, heard it, felt it?
Yes.
You are right, the killer whale said. You must go back.
I know it, Orca said, astonished. But I didn’t think you’d understand.
Of course I understand. I’ve always understood. We’ve waited for what you are telling us. You must go back, and learn, and return to tell us more.
o0o
Radu touched the call bell at Marc’s one last time, not expecting an answer, not getting any. Marc must still be taken by his affliction. Even his analogue remained silent.
Radu moved to the back of the dark, leaf-lined alcove and sat on the floor in the shadows, trying to think.
It was, perhaps, for the best. Radu had endangered Orca, earlier, with his naiveté. He did not want to do the same thing to Marc. He should have learned enough by now, he should know enough about earth, to solve his own problems without jeopardizing everyone who made the mistake of befriending him.
The pilots had made serious threats when they knew neither what they wanted from Radu, nor whether what they wanted would be important. Now the administrators knew what they wanted, and had defined it as essential. If they were willing to attempt what he feared, then they admitted no limits to the means they would use to get it.
He closed his eyes for a moment, but that made it too easy to remember Twilight, and the plague.
He had only one course left to take, one he had avoided because he had sworn never to use it. He went to Kathell Stafford’s apartment.
The hour was unconscionably late, but one of her aides was always on duty. Radu put his hand to the sensor concealed in the silver filigree. When he stayed here the door had opened to his touch, but he expected no more, now, than an answer from inside.
The door opened. Lights, music, and laughter spilled out around him. Radu hesitated. He had become accustomed to silence and solitude in this place, where he and Laenea had begun to know each other. Seeing it overrun by Kathell Stafford’s permanent floating party made him uncomfortable and unhappy. He moved inside. All the other guests wore gold or silver or rainbow colors with the quality of jewels. Radu felt as if he could pass among them completely unnoticed, obliterated like a drab satellite at the noon of a hundred suns.
He made his way through the smoke of cigars as heavy and pungent as any Ramona ever smoked, through the powerful artificial odors meant to represent outdoor smells. He repressed a sneeze.
Deep inside the apartment the crowd thinned slightly and the music changed from loud and atonal to delicate and melodic. The light here had a softer quality. He paused, lost, in the middle of an unfamiliar room. Some of the interior walls had been changed around and redecorated.
It would be painful bad luck to stumble upon the scarlet and gold room where he and Laenea had spent so much time.
Finally he saw Kathell, standing all alone against the curving wall of her largest living room. When she saw him, her expression hardened. He crossed the thick carpet and stopped before her.
“You took your time,” she said coldly. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you alone,” he said. “I can’t tell you what I want in public.”
One of her guests wandered toward them, staggering slightly, a drink in his hand. He wore an emerald-colored robe, opaque yet giving the impression that a deep jewel formed its surface.
He blinked blearily at Radu, then, with disappointment, at Kathell.
“Oh…” he said.
“What do you want?” Kathell was speaking to Radu but her invited guest took the question for himself.
“I thought this one had come back with the Aztec,” he said.
“It’s urgent,” Radu said to Kathell, ignoring her guest’s insulting reference to Laenea.
“This isn’t one of your better parties, Kathell,” the other man said querulously. “Where’s the entertainment?” He looked Radu up and down. “And I don’t mean the rare privilege of chatting with a novice crew member.”
“Will you go away!” Radu snapped. “Can’t you see we’re trying to talk?”
“Last time I came to one of your parties, I didn’t even get to meet the Aztec —”
“The pilot!” Radu said angrily.
“What?” He looked around. “Where?”
“She isn’t here,” Radu said. “Pilots don’t like to be called ‘Aztecs.’” To Kathell he said, “It’s important.”
The other guest spoke to Radu directly for the first time. “And what makes you think you know so much about pilots?”
Radu started to get angry, but that was pointless. The question was ludicrous, yet entirely appropriate. He opened his mouth to answer, changed his mind and shut it again, and realized he must look like a gasping fish. He began to laugh.
“Nothing,” he said. He chuckled. “Nothing at all.” A fit of laughter overcame him. He could not stop it. He laughed till tears ran down his face, till he had to lean against the wall or risk falling down. “What makes you think I know anything about pilots?”
A young man, almost as plainly dressed as Radu and with the look of one of Kathell’s aides about him, appeared at the edge of their small group.
“Find him something to amuse him,” Kathell said to her aide, and then, to Radu, “Come along.”
The aide led her drunken guest in one direction; Kathell took Radu the other way, to a smaller, quiet room.
“Now,” she said, “what do you want?”
“Is one of your blimps on the port?”
“Of course,” she said. “Is that all?”
“No,” Radu said, reacting to the contempt in her voice. “It’s true I want to use the blimp, but no doubt you’d consider that — or any material request my barbarian imagination could come up with — an unacceptably trivial demand.”
“That is true. You’re trying my patience, Radu Dracul. Are you looking for an enemy?”
“I have as many enemies as I need,” he said. “It isn’t just the blimp I want from you. I want something more important and more difficult.”
She waited.
“I want you to lie for me.”
“Explain yourself.”
“I want you to loan me your blimp. I won’t tell you where I intend to take it, but I will return it to you if I possibly can. When people come asking for me — and it won’t be just anyone, they will be powerful, and they make threats they can carry out — I want you to tell them… I don’t care what, but anything except that you know how I got away.”
“What am I helping you run away from, Radu Dracul?”
“I don’t owe you an explanation. You made the rules, and the rules say you owe me. You can either pay the debt you’ve imposed upon yourself, or declare yourself my enemy. But decide which, now, because I don’t have time to wait.”
“You’re learning the ways of earth quickly,” she said.
“Not with any willingness,” he said.
Her eyelids fluttered.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling a pilot, of course,” she said, most of her attention on her internal communicator.
“The last thing I want is a pilot!” he said, thinking, How could she know enough to betray me?
She opened her eyes again. “A blimp pilot,” she said, smiling very slightly.
“I don’t want a blimp pilot, either,” Radu said. “Do you want to see my license?”
“From Twilight, no doubt.”
“No doubt.”
“Anyone who works for me will abide by the promises I give,” she said.
Radu turned and started for the door.
“The airship and the deception are yours,” Kathell said. “And then my debt is paid.”
Radu went back out into the night, made his way to the airship field, and sought Kathell Stafford’s blimp. No other was like it. It was a great gold oval glowing with reflected light against the sky. The breeze shifted slightly. Each airship swung a few degrees around the mast to which its nose was tethered. The tail of Stafford’s craft began to rise. The fan controlling the buoyancy whirred, and the landing wheel touched down with a gentle thump of rubber on the decking.
Despite his claim to Stafford, Radu felt apprehensive about piloting a blimp here, where the level of technology was so much higher than on his own world. The controls might easily be alien. He swung up into the gondola and reached for the spot where the dashboard light switch would be, if he were back on Twilight.
The lights glowed on, illuminating a panel almost identical to the one on the airship he had piloted as a youth, directing a rudimentary autopilot, a few electronics, and simple mechanical controls for buoyancy and orientation.
And in only three dimensions, he thought.
He disconnected the sensors, started the engine and left it in neutral, then jumped back to the deck. He climbed the mast in the dark, expecting at any moment to be challenged and stopped.
Launching a blimp solo was a tricky job. Ten meters above the deck, he unfastened the line and pulled it free. The wind immediately began to blow the ship backward. Radu climbed down again, gripping the line. While he let the wind push the ship away from the mast, he moved sideways, set his heels, and pulled. Almost imperceptibly the ship swung toward him, so its nose no longer pointed directly at the mast. The wind caught its flank and pushed and lifted it like an enormous kite.
Radu sprinted for the gondola, grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder, dragged himself up, flung himself inside, and scrambled to the pilot’s seat.
He tilted the airship back on its tail and threw the engine out of neutral. The propellers roared.
The airship took off, rising almost straight up into the sky.
o0o
Marc chatted with Orca’s brother while they waited for Orca to return. The young man was fascinating: He had had experiences Marc had never imagined, experiences at least as unusual as those of pilots. While they talked, the crowd slowly dispersed and vanished. When almost everyone had left, a slender woman with short iron-gray hair came out of the shuttle alone and approached the bench where Marc was sitting. Marc smiled to himself, wondering if Kri van de Graaf would recognize him after all these years.
She stopped and frowned, looking at the diver.
“Sorry,” she said abruptly to Mark. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Are you looking for Orca? We’re waiting for her, too. She just went for a swim. She’ll be back soon. I’m her brother. I’ve come to visit.”
“Oh,” Kri said. Marc had seldom seen her nonplussed. He cleared his throat. She glanced at him, then took a step forward.
“Marc?” she said. “Marc, my gods, where did you come from?”
He stood to greet her. “So many interesting things have been happening, I couldn’t resist.”
“‘Interesting,’” she said. “Yes, indeed. As in the curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’”
“Can you tell me?”
She drew her eyebrows together. “I’m sorry. I think not, for the moment. I don’t know quite what your status is.”
He offered her a place on the bench and sat down beside her. Suddenly she shivered.
“Where are your clothes?” she asked Mark.
“I don’t have any.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
“No. Are you?”
“Yes. What size are you?” she asked him.
Mark looked down at his own naked body. “I don’t know. Where do you measure?”
She started to laugh, but he was quite serious. “Never mind,” she said. She ran her hand through her short gray hair. “So Orca’s gone for a swim, and Radu — does either of you know Radu Dracul?”
“No,” Mark said.
But Marc kept his silence until he could find out what she wanted with the young offworlder. For the moment Marc felt glad that Kri did not quite trust him; it saved him from the guilt of not quite trusting her.
Van de Graaf’s irritation increased the longer Orca remained in the sea. Most of the crowd had gone home, and it would be quite safe for the pilots to come out of the shuttle.
A young woman stepped out of the blockhouse, hurried across the deck, and handed a stack of folded material to Dr. van de Graaf.
“Thank you,” the doctor said, handing it on to Mark. Mark looked curiously at what van de Graaf had given him.
“Thank you,” he said. “What is it?”
“Clothes. They’ll fit, or close enough.”
“You want me to put these on?”
“If you plan to stay here long,” she said, “other people will be a great deal more comfortable if you do.”
Mark shrugged, put the folded garments on the deck, and picked up the one on top. He shook it out. It was an ordinary cotton T-shirt.
“The tag goes inside and at the back of the neck,” Marc said.
“Where’s the neck?”
“Here.” He showed him.
“That’s a hole.”
“It goes around your neck.”
He would have ended up with the shirt wrapped around his throat like a scarf, so Marc took it from him and helped him into it as if he were a child. For all the familiarity he had with clothes, he might as well have been. They repeated the process with a pair of stiff new blue jeans.
The jeans were too tight around Mark’s muscular thighs and too loose around his waist. He looked as if he were not so much wearing the clothes as existing inside them.
“That’s the best I can do for now,” van de Graaf said. “If we go shopping, we might miss Orca.”
o0o
Every time Orca surfaced, the point of warmth behind her eyes, the message signal, had gained another level of urgency. It rose through the spectrum from dull red to yellow to blue to incandescent white. She knew that when she answered it she would be ordered back on deck, but when she finally chose to return it was — if it was anything in addition to her own desire — more because her cousins wanted to learn from her than because of what the administrators wanted.
Orca dove one last time, cutting through the water beneath her closest cousin, spinning over, and sliding her hands along the whale’s smooth flanks as she passed her. She surfaced beside the port. She and her cousin called her brother, in harmony, then the killer whale slapped her tail against the water, sounded, and returned to the pod.
A line snaked down the side of the port. Orca climbed hand over hand to the deck.
Her brother reached down. She grabbed his hand and swung herself up. As soon as she came over the edge of the platform and Dr. van de Graaf saw her, the emergency message signal faded, leaving only the normal point of warmth that signaled regular mail. Mostly junk, no doubt, as usual.
The crowd had dispersed. The shuttle stood silent and dark on the runway. Orca had stayed out longer than she meant to, but she felt wonderful. She was full of joy and disbelief at what her cousin had urged.
Orca looked at her brother, astonished. “What’s this?” she said, touching the front of his T-shirt.
“Well…” he said. He shrugged. “Clothes, I guess.”
Orca shook the water from her hair. She put her arm around her brother and they walked back to where Marc sat on one of the benches scattered here and there beside the walkway. Dr. van de Graaf stood nearby, looking impatient.
“About time you deigned to come back,” she said. Orca did not bother to answer.
“I envy your freedom,” Marc said.
Orca’s clothes lay in a neat stack on the end of the bench beside Marc. She felt too warm to put them on yet. She sat crosslegged near him.
“Who are you?” Orca said.
“I told you.”
“You told me your name, that’s all.”
“I’m a friend of Laenea’s.”
Orca heard voices and glanced at the shuttle. The three pilots came down the stairs. Radu was nowhere to be seen.
“Where did Radu go?” Orca asked.
“That’s what we’ve been wondering,” van de Graaf said. “Where did you go? I told you to stay here. We’ve been waiting for you to come back for over an hour.”
“I didn’t realize I’d been out that long,” Orca said without apology.
Van de Graaf’s expression remained cool, but she scooped up Orca’s clothes and tossed them to her with a quick and angry snap of the wrist. Orca plucked them easily out of the air. She doubted that van de Graaf believed she had no idea where Radu had gone.
Despite her calm, the doctor obviously felt angry at Orca for disobeying orders. Pilots could get away with disobeying representatives of the administrators, but it was not a prudent thing for a crew member to do. A week ago that would have worried the diver, but now she felt that no one, administrator or otherwise, could threaten her.
“This is Laenea, and Ramona-Teresa, and Vasili Nikolaievich,” Orca said to her brother, nodding to each pilot in turn. “I guess you’ve met Dr. van de Graaf.” There was an awkward silence in which Orca should have introduced her brother by name, but did not. She could not. “This is my brother,” she said.
Then, to her surprise, her brother said, “You can call me Mark Harris.”
Startled, surprised, and delighted, Orca laughed.
“What’s so funny?” van de Graaf said.
“Never mind,” Orca said. “It’s too complicated to explain.”
She started putting on her clothes.
Laenea glanced at Marc. Orca thought they must not be as good friends as the older man had implied, for Laenea’s expression held more curiosity than recognition. The pilot frowned slightly, took one step toward him, and stopped.
“Marc… ?” she said doubtfully.
He pushed himself up, clasping both hands around the top of his stick to lever himself to his feet.
“Yes,” he said.
“But how —? Why —?”
“It seemed like the right time,” he said.
He extended one hand. Without hesitation she clasped his wrist tightly. They embraced, more like crew members than a pilot and… Orca could not make herself think of Marc as an ordinary, a grounder, but she had no idea at all how she should think of him.
“How did you recognize me?” Marc asked.
“I don’t know. I’m changed,” Laenea said, “from what I was before.”
He smiled at her. “I would imagine so.”
Orca finished tying the laces of her shoes.
“Are you ready?” Van de Graaf’s impatience crackled like static electricity.
“Yes,” Orca said.
“It was good of the two of you to welcome your friends home,” the doctor said, “but we’ll have to leave you now.”
“I’m coming with you,” Orca’s brother said.
“Are you sure?” Orca said.
He nodded. “If you’re not coming home.”
Now that her brother wanted to enter the human world, Orca suddenly felt afraid for him. She wished he had stayed in the sea. He was too much like the cousins to get along well here. To survive, he would have to learn things that he would never need to know, in his real life.
Still, he had chosen the perfect surface name. Perhaps he would get along up here after all.
“It’s impossible,” van de Graaf said. “We’re going to the administration deck. Your brother will have to stay out here.”
“If he stays, I stay,” Orca said.
“Out of the question.”
“Surely not, Kri,” Ramona said. “If it will make Orca more comfortable for her brother to join us, why forbid it?”
Van de Graaf sighed. “All right. He can come.” Her eyelids flickered as she communicated with someone or something. Orca tried, rudely, to listen in, but could not break into the frequency. The doctor returned and glanced at Marc. “I suppose you want to come along, too, Marc?”
“That is true.”
“Oh, what the hell,” van de Graaf said, with the exasperation of someone unused to anything less than total control. “Does anyone have any idea where Radu Dracul might have gone?”
“You saw him the last time I did,” Laenea said.
Van de Graaf glanced at Ramona, asking the same question with her silence.
“He went past me and down the ladder. I thought he was trying to help Orca.”
“Obviously not,” van de Graaf said. “Is there anyone else he might have contacted?”
“As far as I know, everyone on earth that he’s acquainted with is right here,” Laenea said. Then, a moment later, “Except…”
“Who?”
“He only met her once, for a few minutes, at a party.”
“Who?”
“Kathell Stafford. Do you know her?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” She stroked the outer curve of her eyebrow thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The group made its way toward the stabilizer shaft. Marc joined the pilots, who kept their distance from the divers. Dr. van de Graaf walked by herself.
“I like your name,” Orca said softly to her brother.
“I thought it might be awkward for them if I didn’t have one,” Mark said.
“It would have made them uncomfortable — but they often feel like that anyway. They get over it.”
Mark fidgeted inside his new clothes.
“You wear this stuff all the time,” he said.
“When I’m around landers,” Orca said. “But when I wear jeans, I leave them in a tide pool in the sun for about a week and then wash them before I ever put them on.”
“Do you have to stay here?” he said quietly.
“I have to be sure a friend of mine is okay.” She was worried about Radu. Whatever it was he had discovered must have troubled him deeply, to make him disappear so suddenly and completely.
“I mean, would you be able to leave if you wanted?”
“That’s a good question,” Orca said. It surprised her that Mark would ask it, and made her think again that perhaps he could get along in the human world. “I’m not sure I want to. I told the cousins what happened to me out there, and they understood. They want to know more — they want me to go back.”
Mark looked at her curiously. “Really? Tell me what happened, too.”
“I can’t. Not up here, it’s impossible. As soon as we swim, I will.”
“All right.” He walked beside her in silence, in patience.
Orca doubted she would be able to use her internal communicator once she was inside the administration deck, so she quickly explored several record indices. She found no trace of Radu. Orca doubted he would forget the lesson she had taught him. He would leave as little trail as if he were moving through the forest on his own home world.
They approached the blockhouse. An elevator cage, doors open, waited for them.
Orca still felt flushed and warm from the metabolic rush brought on by her swim, but the effect was fading. She would be glad to get out of the wind.
Then the obvious thing occurred to her. She accepted her ordinary mail and scanned the messages quickly.
Among the junk mail was an unsigned note.
I accept your offer, it said, and that was all.
Damn, she thought. It’s the wrong time, the wrong way for all this to work out…
But maybe the only way, for Radu.
Orca grabbed Mark’s hand.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
Without hesitation, without question or surprise, he turned with her and they ran toward the edge of the port. Orca heard van de Graaf curse, startled and irritated; Ramona-Teresa called her name, and Mark’s.
They dove together and sank beneath the waves. Several meters down they swam close together and undressed each other, having trouble and laughing over Mark’s stiff new jeans. They abandoned the clothes by the edge of the port and swam away to join their cousins.