Though no one in the group believed that Orca and her brother had gone for a quick swim, they waited a few minutes, till van de Graaf said, “Divers!” in disgust, and led everyone into the elevator. The doors closed and it slid downward. It stopped at a floor that Laenea had tried to visit a number of times, out of curiosity. The elevator controls always before had refused to acknowledge the request.
The carpet in the foyer was deep and springy; the room van de Graaf led them to exceeded the VIP shuttle in luxury.
The administrators do treat themselves well, Laenea thought.
“The bar’s over there,” van de Graaf said, sat in a chair in a corner, closed her eyes, and went immediately into a communications trance.
“I suppose she thinks all we do when we’re not flying is get drunk,” Vasili said, and flung himself into a chair, where he sat sullenly with his arms crossed.
Ignoring him, Ramona-Teresa poured herself a straight shot of scotch and drank it. Marc found a bottle of tequila at the very back of a shelf. Laenea decided that a drink of cognac was not a bad idea.
I might have expected that Vasili doesn’t drink, Laenea thought. Ah, well, he ought to be happy; at least it gives him something to sulk about.
Laenea was on her second drink and Ramona-Teresa on her fourth when van de Graaf returned.
“Radu has simply disappeared,” she said. “There’s no credit or transportation trace, and Stafford claimed she hadn’t seen him since he was with you. I had to remind her she’d ever met him.”
“It was a far-fetched idea,” Laenea said. “They barely met.” Still, she thought, it was not like Kathell to forget anyone.
“Maybe. But she wasn’t speaking to me directly; she used a remote. She could have been lying.”
“You were monitoring her!” Ramona-Teresa said.
Van de Graaf shrugged.
“I don’t think you need to be so anxious about Radu,” Laenea said quickly. “He’s done this before, gone off alone. He just wants time to think. He’ll be back.”
“You seem very sure of that.”
“Well, what’s a few hours? It will take you a long time to turn him into a pilot.”
“Radu Dracul cannot be a pilot,” Ramona-Teresa said. She poured herself another drink. So far she was completely unaffected by the alcohol.
Laenea frowned. “But I thought — since he perceives seventh —”
“He does. And six other dimensions. But some are different dimensions than those you perceive, which are the dimensions of transit. The intersection is not completely congruous. Without someone to follow, he’d be lost, he’d be blind.”
“Then why do you want him back so badly? Why don’t you just leave him alone?”
“His perceptions are of a different worth entirely than yours.”
“It ought to be obvious to you, of all people, why we want to study him,” van de Graaf said to Laenea.
“Hah!” Vasili said. “She doesn’t even have to think about it. She knows she’s safe.”
“Vaska, what are you talking about?”
“You can’t be lost!” Vasili shouted. “If you get lost, he can find you. What about the rest of us?”
“Oh,” Laenea said. “You’re right, I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that.” The reason, though, was less selfishness than a determination to learn so much about transit that she never again would be lost, and need to be found. “I’m sure, though, if he can find others, he’d do it willingly.”
“It seems unlikely to me that he could find anyone but you,” Ramona-Teresa said.
“Then what —”
“I think,” van de Graaf said, “that his abilities are unique, interrelated, and the result of a single basic change, brought about by the illness he survived. I think it likely that the viral genome integrated itself into his chromosomes.”
“I disagree in part,” Ramona-Teresa said. “I believe that most of his abilities are present in some percentage of the population, but that they can only be expressed in the proper environment. I believe the illness forged some perceptual link between you and him. If you look at the mathematics, you can see that anyone who is aware of seventh is very close to any other person — or any other point — in normal space-time.”
Van de Graaf interrupted. “Whatever the details of the effect, the cause is the illness. It must be. But the samples I took from him — skin and blood, nothing more invasive — show no obvious alteration. I need more samples, of more tissues, nerve tissue in particular, in order to study him properly.”
“No wonder he ran,” Laenea said. “You want to sample his brain?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, pilot. I’m not going to dissect him. Any peripheral nerve cell would probably do; he wouldn’t even notice it. He has no reason to fear me, and even if he did, he had no way of knowing the direction of my speculations.”
“Only a couple of hours of being questioned. You can learn a lot from questions, even if you don’t know the answers. He isn’t stupid. He’s a colonist, he may not have a fine-edged education like you do. But he isn’t stupid.”
“If I thought so before, I don’t think so now,” van de Graaf said.
“You know him better than the rest of us, Laenea,” Vasili said. “Is he so selfish, does he dislike pilots so much, that he’d refuse a little more time and a few more tests, if it would save some of our lives?”
“He’s the least selfish person I know,” Laenea said, annoyed. “And he doesn’t dislike pilots.”
“That isn’t my experience.”
“I think you’re trying to make individual dislike into something more general,” Laenea said, letting the edge in her voice come through.
Vasili colored.
“You still haven’t explained,” Laenea said to Ramona and van de Graaf. “If you don’t think he can find anybody else, why do you need him back so badly?”
“Because the change might be transmissible.”
Laenea sat very still, trying to change the meaning of what she had just heard, but failing; trying to control a slowly rising fury, but failing.
“Good gods,” she said, horrified. “Do you realize what you’re saying?” She stood up, her fists clenched. “How could you even consider such a thing? Are you monsters?”
“What?” van de Graaf said.
“Laenea!” Ramona-Teresa said, in honest protest.
“Don’t you know what that illness did to Radu’s world? It killed every member of his family, and it nearly killed him. I was there, I saw it —”
They waited in patience till she finished her outburst.
Ramona chuckled, low and soft. Laenea glared at her.
“My dear,” Ramona said, “if you only knew how familiar that all sounds.”
“What are you talking about?”
“‘It’s horrible!’ ” Ramona said in a voice not her own. “‘Taking young people and ripping out their hearts and putting in machines instead!’ ”
“But —” Laenea said, confused. “It isn’t the same.”
“How, not?”
“We’re all volunteers, for one thing.”
“Do you think we mean to recreate a plague and infect the population with it? No wonder you think us monsters!”
“Who would volunteer? It kills half the people it touches.”
“More than half,” van de Graaf said. “Nearly all, in fact.”
“Well, then.”
“Don’t you see? That’s why we have to study him. To find out what makes him different. Why did he survive?”
“Can you swear it will be safe?”
“Of course not. Most assuredly it won’t be, not completely.”
“Then he’ll never let you study him, and no one will volunteer anyway.”
“Some might,” Marc said.
She looked at him, shocked.
“If it made me able to fly again. If Kri’s hypothesis is correct, it might do that. Then,” he said softly, “the regeneration might be worth it.”
“The whole point is that we don’t know how he can do what he does, or why — in fact we don’t even know all of what he can do. We need to study him.”
Laenea remained unsoothed.
“He’ll let us test him if you ask him to, Laenea,” Vasili said.
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
“You are selfish,” Vasili said with contempt.
“That may be true,” Laenea said, sick of the accusation. “But what I am more than anything right now is angry.”
“Laenea,” Ramona said, “we must study him. If we can find more people like him —”
“Or create them,” Vasili said, earning himself a sharp look from Ramona.
“— we might develop the ability to communicate with ships in transit, or even directly between the inhabited worlds.”
“Ramona, I can see the potential, even weighed against the risks. But you’re going to have a hard time convincing Radu — if you can find him.”
“He has to come to us if he ever wants to go home,” Vasili said.
Laenea sighed. “He’d sacrifice that if he didn’t believe he could trust you.”
“He must cooperate with us,” Ramona said. “He’s the only source of information we have.”
“If you’ve got to study something, why don’t you study the virus? It might tell you all you need to know.”
“Your expedition was all too efficient,” van de Graaf said. “There’s no record of any subsequent case of plague.”
“You think it’s extinct, then?” No one was allowed on Twilight without being vaccinated, but the antibody was to surface proteins, not genetic material. If the organism had disappeared, no one could reconstruct it.
“Possibly. More likely it still exists, in whatever indigenous host it occupied before people landed on Twilight. Finding it might be difficult, though. Its source was never identified.”
What van de Graaf was telling her was that the most straightforward way of finding the virus would be to send unvaccinated people to the surface of Twilight and wait until they got sick.
“But you can’t…”
“We’d prefer not to,” van de Graaf said.
Marc listened to the conversation quietly, sipping tequila, conserving his strength. He had never been on the administrators’ deck before; it had not yet existed when he was, so briefly, a pilot. Marc knew real antiques from reproductions, and this room’s furnishings were real. Despite the glass wall looking out into the sea, the central fireplace seemed appropriate.
Kri continued to worry the subject of Radu Dracul’s whereabouts, but no one had even mentioned Orca and her brother. Marc was less inclined than the others to assume their departure was a whim, unconnected with Radu’s disappearance.
“Well,” Kri said, “security’s on it, and that’s all we can do for now.” She downed her drink. “We’d all better get some sleep, and start fresh in the morning.”
Marc rose slowly.
“I’ll bid you farewell till tomorrow,” he said. “I will rest better in my own bed.”
Laenea rose. “Let me walk you home,” she said. “You look tired.”
Marc could see Kri preparing to argue against Laenea’s leaving. He suspected Kri would insist that he stay here — which he definitely did not want to do — before she would permit Laenea to go out.
“No, no,” he said. “I’ll be quite all right. I just want to get home before I overtire myself.”
He clasped Laenea’s wrist, and she gripped his. The touch felt strange, but not unpleasant.
As soon as Marc left the administration deck, he opened a communications terminal. He had never acquired an internal communicator, fearing it might further confuse the insulted tissue of his brain. He signaled his analogue, which awakened quickly.
“Where are you?” it said. Its voice remained smooth and calm.
“I’m on my way home.”
“Why are you away from your home?”
“It was an emergency.”
“You should have let me go on duty.”
“I know,” Marc said. “I’m sorry. I forgot. Would you look out in the foyer and see if anyone’s there?”
“Of course.” After a barely perceptible pause, the analogue said, “No one at all.”
“Thank you. I’ll be back soon.”
Marc left the terminal and hobbled homeward, deep in thought: If only he had turned on the analogue… If Radu Dracul had come to him for help, he had found nothing. Well, there was no changing what was past; the future would have to concern him now.
Marc suspected that Kathell Stafford had had good reason to speak via a voice synthesizer to a representative of the transit authority.
o0o
Orca surfaced, trod water, and contacted Harmony. She had to use a satellite to jump the communication over the mountains, but true speech adapted well to radio frequency, and no eavesdropper could decipher her family’s dialect.
Her mother answered.
Hello, chérie, she said, mixing true speech and French as their family sometimes did. Where are you?
Halfway home, Orca said. With Mark.
She added her brother’s true speech name.
Their mother laughed, understanding by the construction that Orca’s brother had adopted a surface name, and understanding the joke immediately. She liked to watch The Man from Atlantis, too.
The news reports are intriguing, chère petite fille, and the gossip even more. How much of it is true?
For once what really happened is more exciting by half, Orca replied. I’ll explain when I get home. My crewmate may come to stay. Has he called?
No.
I don’t know where he is, Orca said. Or how he’s traveling. I told him to ask for us in the harbor at Victoria. He needs our help, mon-amie-maman. Are you feeling revolutionary? Is father?
Your father, always. Me? If necessary.
It may be. When my friend arrives — Orca sent a soundname for Radu; any diver or whale who heard it would recognize him immediately — he’s an offworlder, she added. He’s shy, and modest to several faults. His trouble isn’t of his own making.
We’ll make him welcome, youngling.
Thank you, maman-amie.
Shall I send the boat? You’ll be very late for the gathering, otherwise.
Orca sent a grimace, and her mother laughed again.
Send the plane, instead, maman? The misery won’t last so long.
I will, amie-fille, who loves to fly a ship from world to world, but not island to island.
o0o
The faint glow of the instrument panel gave the only light, the whisper of the noise-baffled propellers the only sound. Radu floated alone in silent darkness, waiting for the sky to lighten, looking forward to the dawn.
His eyelids drooped; he dozed. He jerked awake when his chin touched his chest. The night had retreated by a single shade of blue.
He tried to remember the last time he had slept real, undrugged sleep. He discounted both sleeping in transit (which seemed very much something other), and recovering from unconsciousness and hypothermia in the diver’s quarters. His last full night’s sleep was on Earthstation, when Orca shared his room and his bed. His time-sense automatically sorted through all his perceptions and told him how long ago that had been, subjectively, as well as in elapsed time on earth, an objective measurement. He laughed softly: if objective measurement even made sense anymore.
He could not stay awake till dawn. He turned on the autopilot, glad that it contained only navigational functions. Had it possessed cognition, the computer might answer radio calls and give their position away. Flying very low, the airship would avoid both navigational radar and small craft routes that might otherwise intersect their path.
He was so tired he had to check the autopilot settings four times to get an agreement on the course.
I’ll just nap for an hour, he thought, changing one of the passenger seats to its reclining position. An hour, and then I’ll be able to take over from the autopilot again.
He fell instantly and deeply asleep.
o0o
Laenea woke slowly and with great pleasure, luxuriating in the warmth of the bed and the silence and the quiet blue light of her room. She stretched her bare arms wide, feeling not even a twinge of pain, feeling as if nothing could ever hurt her again.
Flinging off the bedclothes, she rose and dressed without taking time for a shower. She was eager for whatever today would bring.
In the common room of the suite given over to the three pilots, Kristen van de Graaf and Ramona-Teresa sat sipping coffee.
“Good morning,” Laenea said, and poured coffee for herself.
“Good morning.” The doctor sounded tired.
Instead of replying to Laenea, Ramona put aside her cup, and rose. “It’s time for me to catch the ferry,” she said. Her small duffel bag lay beside the door.
“Where are you going?” Laenea asked.
“To see Miikala’s family. To tell them what happened.”
“Should… should I come with you?”
Ramona hesitated. “I think… I think perhaps someday they’ll be able to speak with you, Laenea. I think someday they’ll want to. But not now. Not yet.”
Laenea touched Ramona’s hand. “I understand,” she said. “Ramona, I’m so sorry —”
Ramona-Teresa embraced Laenea, hugging her tight. Then she pulled away, grabbed her duffel bag, and left.
Laenea took her coffee and sat down, wishing she could be more help to Ramona. She glanced across the room at Dr. van de Graaf, whose eyes were slightly bloodshot.
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Laenea asked.
“A little, on and off.”
“You look exhausted.”
“I’ve had other things on my mind. There’s still no trace of your friend.”
“He came back before,” Laenea said. She still believed he would return, though she wondered if he might be better off to stay away.
“I think he must have gone with the divers,” van de Graaf said. “If they’ve taken him in, and he refuses to leave voluntarily, it will be… awkward.”
Laenea knew as well as anyone how jealous the divers were of their sovereign territory. They fiercely protected their cousins from harassment, whether malicious or merely curious.
“I still think you should leave him alone for a while.”
Van de Graaf picked up a slice of toast, bit off one corner, and chewed it thoughtfully.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “He does get rather stubborn when he’s pressed far enough.”
Vasili Nikolaievich emerged from his room, hollow-eyed and haunted. Laenea wondered what to say to him. His envy and disappointment saddened her.
“Vaska —”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know what to do.” His words were as intense as his gaze. He turned to van de Graaf. “I have to go to Ngthummulun. I have to find Atnaterta. He knew what was going to happen —”
He described Radu’s experience on Atna’s home world. Laenea listened without comment. She had flown with Atna. It was true that he was an excellent navigator. It was true that Ngthummulun had produced equally excellent pilots.
“If Atna can teach me what he did — how he knew what was going to happen to Radu —” Vasili’s words trailed off, as if he had not quite finished imagining what it was that he wanted from Atna. He stared at van de Graaf, anxious for her reaction. “Can’t you see —”
Laenea held back from saying what she thought. None of the pilots from Ngthummulun had perceived seventh, and none was as good a pilot as Vaska. Laenea herself, though she could do the one thing Vasili wished to be able to do, was not as fine a pilot as he.
Not yet, anyway, she thought.
Dr. van de Graaf stroked her eyebrow with the tip of one finger. “It’s worth checking,” she said.
Neither her expression nor her tone revealed whether she believed Vasili’s idea to be reasonable, or whether she simply had no more heart than Laenea for crushing out his dream. She put aside her toast and said, “I assume you’re both ready to do some more exploring.”
Laenea stood and put down her cup so quickly that some of the coffee splashed out onto the table.
“I am,” Laenea said. “When do we leave?”
“Not quite yet,” van de Graaf said.
Laenea took one step toward her, hands outspread in supplication, ready to argue against a delay of weeks or even days.
Van de Graaf smiled. “Finish your breakfast, first.”
o0o
When Radu woke he thought, groggily, did I sleep? It was nearly dawn, the sky was midnight blue, and now it’s no lighter.
Perhaps he had merely dozed for a moment, then awakened again. He thought about his time sense.
It was night again, not night still. He had slept the whole day; he was approaching his destination.
Victoria was a stolid, beautifully tended, rather fussy old city. The last streaks of scarlet sunset faded into the ocean. Lights flicked on here and there, illuminating windows in the ivy-covered stone of the Empress Hotel and picking out the cabins of rows of sailboats moored along the piers. Flowerbeds covered the banks of the harbor. In the dusk, the colors dimmed to white and shades of gray.
Radu nosed the airship toward the landing field by the ferry dock. It was plainly marked on the chart, plainly marked against the land by several sets of concentric circles, worn into the grass by the landing wheels of different sized airships, one set circumscribing each mooring mast.
Landing a blimp solo was even more difficult than launching it. He would have to descend upwind of the mast and let the wind push the ship into position. That carried the risk of ramming the mast and puncturing the envelope. But it was his only choice. Unless the air was completely still — and it was not; he could tell from the way the blimp handled and from the ripples across the dark water — then trying to drag the ship against the wind would be sheer stupidity.
A shadowy silhouette ran across the field toward him as his craft neared the ground. Radu tensed, ready to take off again. Perhaps Kathell had failed to deceive the administrators; perhaps she had even turned him in. He found her character incomprehensible, how seriously she took her word a mystery.
Radu had left the radio off, so, for all he knew, whatever agency controlled the city’s airspace might well have been ordering him all afternoon to give up and come down.
The airship dropped low enough for Radu to see that the woman running toward him, far from being dressed in the uniform of a security guard or the severe suit of an executive, wore raggy cutoffs and a tank top. She paced the airship. Radu opened the window and leaned out.
“Come down till I can reach the ladder!” she yelled. “Be ready to drop some ballast and take off again.”
“Who are you?”
She raised her hand, fingers spread. Light from one of the field’s floodlamps turned the thin membranes of her swimming webs pink and gold.
Radu dipped the airship sharply down and reached across to open the door. The diver grabbed the ladder and swung herself into the gondola. As it sank, and the landing wheel bounced against the grass, Radu dumped sixty kilos of ballast and gunned the engines. Lighter now than before the diver came aboard, the ship took off at a steep angle.
The diver scrambled up the tilted floor and slid into the forward passenger seat.
“Well,” she said, looking him up and down, “you’re definitely the person Orca sent me to meet. You can call me Wolf. What’s your name?”
“Radu Dracul,” he said. “Didn’t Orca tell you who I was?”
“Yes,” Wolf said. “And a great deal more. She gave you a true name that’s a description of you. One would have to be blind and deaf not to recognize you after hearing it.”
“What is it?” Radu asked.
“I can’t say it out of water. It would just sound like cacophony, anyway. That was the idea, over the radio, if she’d used your surface name it would have been obvious who we were talking about even if no one not a diver could understand the whole conversation.”
“Oh,” Radu said. “Thank you for meeting me.”
“Head north,” Wolf said. “We’ll be at Harmony by midnight.”
He did as she said. As they passed over a tremendous domed Victorian building, strings of white light bulbs lit up, outlining it completely. Its walls vanished into darkness and it became a phantom carnival structure.
“What is that?” Radu asked.
Wolf chuckled at his reaction. “The Parliament building,” she said.
“Why do they do that to it?”
“For tradition. For the tourists. Just for fun, I guess. They’ve been doing it for more than a hundred years.”
The blimp sailed over the Parliament building, then north. Victoria fell behind them. The lights of small towns dotted the coast, and ground cars on the highway spread tiny moving fans of illumination before them. In the Strait, a pale navigational beacon flashed strobically, streaking the water with its beam. Reflected by its own sails, chased by its phosphorescent wake, a ferryboat glistened like an elongated carousel.
“Did Orca tell you why I’ve come to you?”
“No,” Wolf said. “She said you needed help.”
“That’s certainly true,” Radu said. “I wouldn’t have involved her, or you, but she was already involved, and I couldn’t see any alternative.”
“She also said you were her friend. That gives us the privilege of helping you, if we can.”
Wolf was in her mid-forties, perhaps, a handsome woman, taller than Orca but with similar coloring: dark skin and very pale hair. The handle of a knife strapped to her leg projected through the split side seam of her cutoffs, in easy reach.
“You’d better hear what happened, first,” Radu said.
He told her everything.
“Now I see why my daughter asked if I were feeling revolutionary,” Wolf said when Radu had finished.
“Will it come to that?” Radu asked. “Would they attack you, to make me go back?” He felt a deep distress at the possibility of involving the divers in warfare.
“If they do, they’ll use very diplomatic violence. We keep our fights on a high plane these days.” She smiled; the resemblance between her and her daughter became that much more striking. “Now let me ask you something. Do you truly believe your employers would infect people with this disease, if you let them recreate it?”
“I don’t want to believe it,” Radu said. “But all their questioning led in that direction. And they wouldn’t tell me what they meant to do. I was afraid that if I waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to stop them if that was what they planned.”
Wolf nibbled on her fingernail, deep in thought, and remained silent most of the rest of the trip.
o0o
While waiting all day to catch a shuttle, Laenea had plenty of time to think. The administration had no real reason to schedule this exploratory trip so soon, and the haste with which it had been arranged insured that it would be poorly organized and result in little useful information. Laenea was anxious to return to transit, but she did not let the administrators use her eagerness or her joy to erase her suspicions.
Radu was still missing; Orca had vanished into the sea. Even Marc remained unavailable. He had set his analogue to answering his phone, and the analogue had years of experience at courteously refusing to reply to questions. Laenea was the only link to Radu the administrators had left, and she had no doubt that they wanted him back. It seemed likely to her that they hoped Radu would perceive that she had entered seventh again, fear that she was once more in danger, and give himself away.
But she let her employers think she believed what they told her about exploration and knowledge. She had two reasons. First, she believed she had at least as good a chance of warning Radu as of betraying him.
Second — and perhaps Vasili Nikolaievich was right; perhaps she was brutally selfish — Laenea could not bear to be out of transit any longer.
o0o
As Wolf had said it would, the blimp reached Harmony by midnight. Radu guided the airship to a meadow on the crest of the island. Several divers grabbed its trailing lines and drew it to the mast; others came running with bags of sand to heave into the ballast compartments. Soon the blimp rolled in a gentle, narrow arc, swinging back and forth in erratic wind currents. Wolf and Radu climbed down.
To his surprise, Orca waited for him on the ground.
“Welcome to Harmony,” she said to Radu. “Hi, loup-chérie,” she said to her mother, giving her a quick embrace. She hugged Radu tightly. Instead of the bright, metal-scaled clothing she wore on shipboard, she had on a pair of faded blue cutoffs like everyone else. She still wore her red deck shoes.
“I’m very grateful to you,” Radu said.
“We haven’t done anything yet. You’d better wait and see if we can be of any help.”
Just being among people he felt he could trust, people who had no motive to deceive him or bend him to their will, was the greatest help he could wish for right now. Just being in a real place, a place not constructed, artificial, controlled, made him happy.
“How did you get here so fast?” Radu said. “Do you ride the killer whales?”
Orca laughed. “No. They hate it when you do that. Mom sent the seaplane for us.” She introduced her brother, who stood back shyly in the shadows. He resembled Orca closely, and he was naked; he did not even carry the knife belt most of the other divers wore next to their skin.
“I’m glad to see you survived the flight,” Wolf said smiling.
“As well as I ever do.”
“I liked it,” Mark said. “I’d like to learn to fly a plane. What’s flying a blimp like?”
“I’d be glad to show you, if we get a chance,” Radu said.
“Forgive me, mes petites,” Wolf said. “I’ll leave you. Radu, you’ll have to excuse us if we’re a bit distracted tonight.” She gripped his upper arm in a welcoming gesture and vanished into the darkness. Mark stayed with them a moment, then suddenly said, “I have some things to do, too. See you later,” and disappeared.
Orca watched him go. “Well, he isn’t very subtle yet, but he’s getting the idea.”
“Has anyone asked about me?” Radu said, preoccupied. “Do you think they can find out where I am?”
“They’ll probably figure it out eventually.” She took his hand. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”
“I wish I hadn’t had to involve you,” Radu said.
“No more apologies. They aren’t necessary. I offered you our help. I’m glad you trust me enough to take it.” She drew him along the dark path, down from the crest of the island toward its shore. “Stop worrying for a while.”
She took him through a grove of evergreen trees. The ground was soft beneath his feet, the rocky island soil cushioned by layers of fallen needles. Radu had been so long among machines and concentrations of people, the constant background noise of civilization, that the silence of Orca’s home struck him with wonder. It was a presence, not an absence. He stopped, so even his footsteps did not mar it. Orca stopped, too, and glanced back curiously.
Nothing Radu could think of to say to her expressed what he felt, so he remained silent. They continued on along the path.
Nestled against the slope, nearly concealed by trees, a low, shingled building faced the water. Orca opened the carved wooden door and led him inside, where she kicked off her shoes and set them on a shelf in the entryway. Radu followed suit.
“This is the longhouse,” Orca said. “The labs are down at the other end, sleeping rooms are this way.” She showed him to a room that was illuminated by moonlight streaming through the window. Tatami mats covered the floor, and a futon lay folded against one wall next to a low wooden table holding a brass lamp. The room was spare and peaceful. Radu felt immediately at home, as he had not, not anywhere, for years. He walked to the window and looked out. The hillside fell away sharply to the water; trees outlined without obscuring the wide channel between this island and the next. A white flash caught his gaze. A killer whale arced upward, then vanished beneath the water. Another followed, and a third. As Radu’s eyes became more accustomed to the darkness he could see more than the bright patches on the creatures’ sides. The bay and the channel beyond were full of whales and divers, playing and swimming, surfacing and disappearing again with barely a splash, barely a ripple.
In the channel, a creature bigger than anything Radu had ever seen, or ever imagined, glided in a slow and graceful curve across the surface of the water. He gasped.
The moonlight silvered Orca’s pale hair. Radu had not even noticed her move beside him, but now he was acutely aware of her presence.
“What was that?” Radu whispered.
“A great whale,” Orca said. “A blue. They’re open ocean beings, they never come into straits or bays. But a representative came, for our transition meeting.”
Radu watched, fascinated. The enormous creature spouted, then lay quiet on the surface of the water.
“There are only a few of them left,” Orca said. “It’s only been thirty years since they stopped being hunted —” She stopped, started again, and said with difficulty, “Since humans stopped killing them. It will take them a long time to recover, if they ever do.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Radu said.
“Being near them, talking to them — it’s like being at the center of the universe,” Orca said. “It’s terrifying, but they can’t understand that. Fear is one of the few things they can’t understand. The blues aren’t afraid of my cousins, even though sometimes — not anymore, because of the truce, but in the past and maybe in the future — killer whales killed blues.”
Radu looked down at her. She was intent on the scene below.
“You need to be down there, don’t you?”
She replied, finally, after a long silence. “Yes,” she said. “I really do. I’m sorry. You must be exhausted. Why don’t you sleep for a while? I’ll be able to spend some time with you in the afternoon.”
“I don’t think I could sleep,” Radu said. “I’d rather — would it be impolite of me to sit on the shore and watch? I don’t want to intrude on your privacy… ”
She glanced up at him, her smile one of amusement and even glee, the somberness of a moment ago vanished.
“It wouldn’t be rude at all. You’re our guest, a member of my family, while you’re here. Radu — would you like to come swimming with me?”
He felt as if she had offered him a new world, one he had dreamed of but could never find.
“Yes!” he said, then ruefully, “But I tried that before, remember, and it didn’t work out very well.”
“You just weren’t properly prepared,” she said. “Come on.” She took him through the hall and down a long flight of steps, wood first, then stone, that led into the living rock of the island. At the bottom, a tunnel reached out to a wooden dock that crossed the tiny, rocky beach. A small chamber had been cut near the mouth of the tunnel. Inside it, Orca chose a garment from a hook on the wall. It was black, with a white stripe up each side and down each arm.
“It’s a wet suit,” Orca said. “Once in a while we get a visitor who’s a lander, and wants to swim. A field suit would protect you, but you wouldn’t really be in the water. The wet suit is better. Ever wear one before?”
“No.”
“It’ll keep you warm. You’ve probably never worn a scuba tank —?”
He shook his head.
“Okay. I’ll teach you to use the tank some other time. Tonight you can use a snorkel.”
She helped him out of his clothes and into the wet suit, then led him to the end of the dock. He entered the dark water hesitantly. After a quick shock of cold, the trapped water warmed against his skin and he felt perfectly comfortable.
“You won’t want to go very deep anyway, or move around too much, just yet,” Orca said. “But you can watch and listen.”
They swam out into the bay.
Listening was extraordinary. He could see very little, despite the clear water and the face mask that permitted him to open his eyes beneath the surface. But the sounds — ! He was surrounded by them, engulfed and inundated, penetrated: long, leisurely songs that formed a background to it all, trains of clicks and whistles that started below his hearing range, sailed up through it like a rocket, and passed far beyond, moans and sighs and laughter. At times he felt he was at the focus of a wave of sound, as if one of Orca’s cousins, or even one of the other, larger whales, were looking him over, sounding him out. Radu hung in the water, just beneath the surface, breathing through the snorkel and trying to make out the forms and shapes around him. Orca waited long enough to be certain he was comfortable, then swam to join the others. But now and again a diver passed Radu and touched him reassuringly, or waved; a few times one of the killer whales glided beneath him, and once one let its fluke curve up and stroke him from chest to toes. The touch was unbelievably gentle. Nothing in his life before, not his first trip into space, Twilight spinning slow and graceful above him, not Earthstation, not even the moment of transition into seventh, had affected him like this. He felt calm, and enchanted, and in the midst of a magic night.
For a long time nothing moved nearby, and the sounds receded. Radu moved his hands till he floated upright with his head above the surface. He barely needed to tread water, the wet suit was so buoyant. He pushed the mask to his forehead. The group of whales — several kinds of whales, now, besides the killers and the magnificent blue — had moved out through the mouth of the bay, to the channel. Radu slid his mask back down and set off after them.
The bottom dropped away sharply. Radu kept swimming. He was not at all afraid or even apprehensive. Soon he was as close to the group as he had been before, perhaps a little closer, and his good sense overcame his desire actually to go among the whales. No matter Orca’s welcome, he was only honorarily and temporarily a member of her family. He was a landbound guest, wrapped in black rubber, while the beings nearby frolicked naked in the freezing sea, and spoke to each other in song.
Very slowly — so slowly he felt not the slightest fear — a shape rose up beneath him. It was so big it lost its form in distance and darkness.
The blue whale rose till its great eye looked him right in the face. From a distance the blue whale had been awe inspiring. This close, its size was simpler: incomprehensible. Radu reached out, as slowly as the whale had approached him, hesitantly, in case his touch might be unwanted. The whale closed its eye, and opened it again, and did not move. Radu touched its skin. It was soft and smooth and warm. Even when he took his hand away, he could feel the warmth of the whale radiating through the water.
The great blue whale blinked at him again, embracing Radu in sound.
I can’t understand you, Radu thought. I wish I could, but I can’t. I can’t even speak to you in my own language, not around this rubber mouthpiece and through all this water.
The blue whale blinked a third time; the caress of music ceased. The whale moved very slowly forward, gliding past Radu, making no more noise than a feather in air. It curved downward, diving. The pressure of the water parting for it pushed Radu gently back. He lay motionless, entranced by the whale’s sheer presence.
A lifetime later the creature’s flukes slid by beneath him, and it vanished into depths of dark water.
Radu dove down after it and swam a few meters, fighting the buoyancy of the wet suit.
“Wait—”
Air bubbled up around his face and he got a mouthful of cold salt water. It served to bring him to his senses. He struck out for the surface, broke through, and gasped and coughed for air.
Now he knew how Orca had felt, confronting the edge; he understood why she had left the ship. He knew how Vasili and Laenea felt in transit. He knew what it was like to meet an alien.
The divers and the whales cavorted and played far off in the channel. Radu knew he could not join them. He turned and swam back into the bay, toward the lights of the divers’ house.
He was halfway there when Orca broke the surface nearby and swam beside him.
“She talked to you,” Orca said. Awe touched her voice.
“I guess she did,” Radu said. He stopped swimming and faced her. “But I couldn’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. You might not have understood her even if you could understand true speech. But the blues hardly ever speak to divers, Radu! They’ve never adopted any of us as their family.”
Some faint ambition and unformed wish faded away just as Radu became aware of its existence. He felt tired and lonely.
“Would it be rude for me to go ashore?” he asked.
“No, of course not. Come on. I’ll swim with you.”
Radu set out to cross the other half of the bay, swimming slowly. Orca sidestroked alongside him, graceful even at a pace that to her must have been like creeping, or floundering.
Radu climbed up the ladder and stood dripping on the dock. Orca helped him out of the wet suit and showed him how to rinse it in fresh water, to keep the salt from damaging it. Radu hardly noticed the chill of the air on his bare skin; it was almost as if he had learned the divers’ ability to stay warm in freezing water. He and Orca walked down the dock and into the cavern.
“Orca…”
“Hmm?”
“What did she say to me?”
“That’s awfully hard to explain, here on the surface.”
“Please,” he said desperately. “Please try.”
“She told you her name. Not just the sonic description, her whole name. That’s part of what’s hard to explain. Your sonic name is objective — anybody who’s met you knows what it is, and anybody who hears it will recognize you immediately. The rest of it… it’s a combination of your experiences and your feelings and your beliefs. Then she asked you your name —”
“And I couldn’t answer…”
“She understood. I’m sure she did. She knew you weren’t a diver. She wouldn’t be offended. They just aren’t, not ever. Then she welcomed you to the transition, and said you and she would speak together some other time.”
“Is that possible?”
“You’d have to learn middle speech, at least. True speech would be better.”
“They must be difficult languages.”
“Well, I grew up speaking them, so I don’t know how hard they are for adults. But I’ve been told they’re easy to begin to learn. They’re very flexible, though, and I don’t think anybody — any of the divers — knows true speech completely. Parts of it you can make up as you go along, and anyone who speaks it will understand what you’re saying.”
Radu raised one eyebrow, not exactly disbelieving Orca, but finding the description difficult to comprehend.
“I don’t think anything exists that you can’t describe in true speech,” Orca said.
“Not anything?”
Orca hung the wet suit up on its peg and tossed Radu his clothes.
“I guess I’d have to see transit to prove that, wouldn’t I?” Her voice was distant and thoughtful.
She accompanied him upstairs. He felt comfortable enough in her presence now that he did not feel the need to dress himself immediately.
The simplicity of the divers’ house welcomed Radu in a way that none of earth’s overdone luxury could match, in a way he had not experienced since before his family died. In his room again, he looked down on the channel where the whales and divers swam.
“What are they doing out there?” Radu said.
“Playing. Talking. Loving each other. Later on, they’ll vote on whether to make the transition.”
“I shouldn’t keep you,” he said, reluctantly. “Shouldn’t you be down there with them?”
“No. I’m not voting.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t matter. The vote will be for transition. But I’m not going through it again.”
“Orca, you’ll be left behind. Your whole family will change —”
“I will, too. But it will be a different kind of change, one that isn’t compatible with remaining a diver. I’ve applied for pilot’s training, and they’ve accepted me.”
He started to protest, for he could not imagine giving up the freedom of the ocean once one had tasted it. But Orca was reaching for a different freedom.
“Soon you’ll be able to find out for yourself if true speech can explain transit.”
Her soft laugh held an undertone of sadness. “Yes. I’m glad you understand. Some of my blood-family thinks I’m crazy. I had an awful fight with my father about it.”
“Your father sounds like a formidable opponent,” Radu said.
“Yes, formidable,” she said, stretching the word out in its French pronunciation. “I tried to get him to come meet you, but he wouldn’t. Even after the blue talked to you. He said he hadn’t spoken to a lander since the revolution, and he wasn’t about to start now.”
“Would he speak to me,” Radu said hesitantly, “if I… if I weren’t a lander?”
Silently, Orca reached out and brushed a damp lock of Radu’s hair from his forehead.
“Is that what the blue understood?” she said. “Will you be staying here? Will the blues finally have a human cousin?”
“Is it possible?”
“That’s how we all started, as landers, a couple of generations ago. And once in a while — not often, and I won’t pretend it’s easy — ordinary humans join us and change. To change among the blues, though… Radu, I’m scared for you.”
He sat down on the window seat. The great mass of hope and confusion he had carried inside him since seeing and touching the great blue whale grew denser and hotter and suddenly fused into a white and glowing star. He flung his arms around Orca and held her tight. She embraced him, stroking his hair.
“Don’t be afraid for me. Be happy for me, and I’ll be happy for you.”
She knelt beside him, and kissed him, hard. She took his hand and drew it between them so their bodies pressed their clasped hands together.
o0o
Laenea stepped on board her transit ship.
True, she would not be piloting it herself, for she had never even flown simulation on such a large craft. True, she was technically not qualified to solo even in a training ship, for Miikala had not, of course, certified her. And true, every other pilot on board had far more seniority.
Nevertheless, it was hers. It was here because of her; it was preparing for transit because of her. Kristen van de Graaf had asked her to return to transit with a group of experienced pilots, in the hope of introducing them to seventh.
She stepped on board, and a dozen pilots, who had been gathering here all day, greeted her.
She knew several of them — Jenneth, and Chase, both from earth, and Quentin, from the same home world as Atnaterta. She paused, not knowing what to say, seeing in them the same expression she had seen in the faces of grounders meeting a pilot. She glanced quickly over her shoulder. The hatch swung slowly closed.
“Laenea —”
She faced the pilots again. Jenneth, who had spoken, came toward her, carrying a small flask of iridescent blue glass. She offered it to Laenea. Laenea accepted it.
“What is it?”
“The ashes of your heart.”
Laenea looked down at the flask again, and traced a pattern of color that curved up its cool, smooth side.
She tried to say something, but joy made her speechless. She raised her head. All the other pilots watched her, smiling, remembering their own final initiation, the gift of their freedom.
“Thank you,” Laenea finally managed to whisper. She laughed suddenly with joy, and the other pilots surrounded her, laughing with her, embracing her, welcoming her to their company.
o0o
Radu woke warm and content, with Orca nestled sleeping against him. The room was suffused with the midnight blue light just preceding dawn.
He stretched, happy for the moment to doze in the silence. But as midnight blue turned to azure, he could not stay inside. He kissed Orca gently and slid from beneath the down comforter without disturbing her.
He put on his pants, picked up his boots in the foyer, and sat on the outside steps to slip into them. There was a lot of brush on the hillside, and the path was rough. Even among the divers, only Orca’s brother Mark climbed around barefoot on their rocky island.
The approaching dawn turned the world a soft, misty blue-gray. The salt tang of the ocean and the spicy scent of the trees blended into one. In the bay, the killer whales lay in black patterns against the slate-colored water. He looked for the blue, but could not find her.
Radu climbed the path to the crest of the island. The blimp drifted motionless in the still air, its landing wheel a hands- breadth from the ground.
Radu clambered to the top of a projection of smooth gray lichen-patched rock, the highest point of the island, to watch the first sunrise that he had ever witnessed on this world.
The edge of the sun crept over the mountains to the east, a single point of clear yellow light. It grew to an arc, until he had to look away.
The sunlight and the colors fairly dazzled him. He took a deep breath of the sun-sharpened resiny air and stretched his arms wide. He chose, deliberately and willingly, to see this place in the manner that had been forced upon him in seventh. Since returning to earth he had been afraid to look at the world that way, afraid of being overwhelmed again by the perception of rapid change. Here, the pace would be slower and more careful.
The morning breeze touched his hair, ruffling the locks at the back of his neck, on his forehead, touching his chest and shoulders with a caress as gentle as Orca’s lips.
The world opened out around him. He did not try again to see any single specific thing. He knew from trying to look at Laenea that it was impossible. But he could see and feel the multiplicity of outlines of gradual, inevitable, growth and life and change and even death.
When he heard a thought as clear as a nearby voice, he was not at all surprised.
o0o
Laenea’s great ship slid into transit. All the pilots had gathered in the control room, and now they waited. They were fearful, eager, apprehensive, intent.
Laenea sat back in the pilot’s chair and let herself experience transit. All the words she had used to describe it during her debriefing, the words she had imagined captured its very essence, lost their meaning and became not only inadequate, but simply wrong. Trying to define what she had missed before, she responded again to the sensation of existing within the universe and, at the same time, surrounding it completely.
“Laenea!”
She realized that Chase had spoken her name several times and received no response.
“Sorry,” she said. “What?”
“No, that’s my question, what are we supposed to be seeing?”
“We don’t know what to look for, remember,” Jenneth said, “you have to show us.”
She showed them.
Chase gasped. One of the other pilots, whose name Laenea could not remember, cursed softly and joyfully, damning himself to horrible purgatories for never having seen what was right in front of him all the time. Quentin frowned slightly. Jenneth folded her arms and stared belligerently through the viewport. The others remained mystified.
“That’s amazing,” Quentin said.
“How do we get into it?” Chase said.
They were always in it, but Laenea knew what she meant. She found an anomaly and took them from a deep cave to the open air, from the land to the sky, from the ground to the excited state.
Jenneth cried out as they made the transition. She covered her eyes and flung herself away from the port. Quentin caught her and held her, embracing her.
“It’s all right,” he said, “it will be all right.”
Laenea stood, worried for the other pilot.
“What did you see?” Quentin said. His tone became more insistent and he grabbed her by the shoulders. “What’s out there?” He shook her.
“Quentin!” Laenea and Chase both grabbed him and dragged him away from Jenneth, who was sobbing and gasping for breath. Chase put her breathing mask to her face, and tried to soothe her.
“Quentin, what’s the matter with you — you saw it for yourself!” Laenea kept her grasp on his arm.
“No,” he said. Tears glistened in his eyes. “No, that’s just it, I didn’t, I lied.”
He fled from the control room.
Laenea returned to Jenneth and Chase.
“What happened, are you all right?”
“I saw… I knew… something…” Jenneth was still crying. “Laenea, please, I want to go home.”
“Soon,” Laenea said, “soon, we won’t stay very long, come lie down.” She glanced back at Chase, who nodded and took over the controls.
Laenea helped Jenneth to the lounge, let her lie on the couch, made sure her breathing mask was easily in reach, and covered her with a blanket.
“Just rest for a few minutes, and we’ll go back soon.”
Jenneth turned her face toward the wall.
In the corridor, Laenea hesitated. She should go back to the control room. Instead, she slipped into her cabin and picked up the small glass jar. She hurried to the airlock and put on a field suit.
Laenea stepped into the airlock and cycled it. She linked her suit to the tether-plate, then opened the hatch.
She pushed herself out of the ship.
She loosened the flask’s stopper. The air within pushed against it. She released it, and the pressure exploded the ashes of her heart into a delicate white sphere, its dust roiling and dispersing as momentum carried it away from the ship.
Laenea cast the urn after it.
She would have liked to remain where she was; instead, she stroked the tether line.
Back inside the ship, Laenea took off her field suit, closed her eyes, and attempted the task she had truly come here to carry out.
Radu?
Laenea.
The tone of his reply was calm and strong and sure.
You can hear me! she said to him.
We’re very near each other, after all.
The administrators are looking for you.
I know it.
They’re hoping you’ll think I’m lost again, so when you try to find me, they’ll find you.
Thank you for telling me.
Did I need to?
Maybe not. But I’m glad to be able to be close to you.
She sent him a smile. So am I. Radu — two more pilots, two who came with me, can see seventh.
Radu said, I’m glad. Is Vasili there? Did he have better luck this time? I didn’t see what was right in front of me, at first. Perhaps it takes practice.
Laenea’s tone was sad. He’s been in transit hundreds of times. If he were able to perceive it… But, no, he isn’t here. He went to Ngthummulun. He’s convinced Atna has some clue to everything that’s happened.
Vasili behaved in a manner both impulsive and compulsive, yet Radu could not convince himself that the young pilot had switched so abruptly from complete rejection to complete acceptance of Atna’s beliefs.
Did Vasili go alone? he asked Laenea.
Just with a crew member. No other pilots.
Laenea, Radu told her urgently, he never meant to go to Ngthummulun. He’s going to Twilight. Don’t you see? He thinks the plague explains what I can do. He’s never been there before, so he hasn’t been vaccinated —
Oh, gods. Of course. The silly fool — !
After a moment’s thought, Radu felt more disgusted than worried. After all, humans had been on Twilight for a generation before the first outbreak of the plague. Perhaps the disease was, as Radu hoped and Kristen van de Graaf feared, extinct. But even if it still existed, Vasili Nikolaievich would have to have incredible bad fortune to contract it with a single unprotected visit to Radu’s home world.
But the risk, however small, was real.
Can you stop him? Radu asked Laenea.
I can try.
I love you, he said, pure and clear, without any shadow of regret or loss.
Laenea sent Radu a caress of love and affection, and vanished suddenly from his perception.
Radu gasped and nearly slid from the pinnacle to the field several meters below. He recovered himself, brought back to the world of the present. Laenea’s touch had been every bit as intense and erotic as any physical contact they had ever had. It was, in some ways, even more powerful. He felt breathless and aroused, yet peaceful. Even his concern for Vasili could not mar his extraordinary sense of well-being. He reached out to Laenea again, to tell her what had happened, to see if the same thing would work for her, but when he tried to find her, she was gone. She had to leave seventh, of course, to chase Vasili to Twilight.
Never mind, for now. Laenea would return to seventh very soon, if she had her way.
They had plenty of time.
He laughed aloud, and jumped down. He turned all the way around, as if he could absorb this spot into his skin and keep it with him forever.
He saw a transparent sparkle in the sky, and heard the distant hummingbird buzz of an engine. The ultralight dipped closer, waggling its wings. Radu waved. The tiny aircraft shimmered to a crooked, bumpy landing. Radu ran after it to help tie it down; it was even more vulnerable to random winds than the blimp, and harder to moor.
He was astonished when Marc climbed stiffly from the tiny cockpit.
“Marc!”
“Good morning, Radu.”
“How did you find me?”
He led the older man to a bench at the edge of the meadow. Marc sat down and stretched his legs out before him.
“I have… sources of information that aren’t easily accessible to the administrators.”
“But why did you come? What are you doing out of your home? Marc, you look exhausted.”
“I know what you’re afraid the pilots want to do. Radu, I understand why you’re afraid, but I came to ask you, to beg you, at least give them a chance. I know there’s a danger, but I promise they aren’t evil people. They would not act as recklessly as you fear —” He spoke all in a rush, desperately; he stopped only when he ran out of breath.
“Why you, Marc? Why did you risk coming here?”
Marc avoided his gaze. “I tried to help…” He stopped. He looked up. The pupils of his pale gray eyes were very large, for such a bright morning. “That’s true, but it isn’t the whole truth. I told you that you could trust me, and I won’t betray your trust now. If they learn what they hope to, I might fly again. I’m here out of selfishness. I want to go back into transit.”
“And the memories you’ll lose? What about them?”
“I’ll have to relearn them, I suppose, along with everything else. My analogue will tell me.”
“That would be worth it to you?”
“If I could change enough to fly again, yes, it would be worth it.” He leaned forward, reaching out in supplication. “Please, Radu.”
Radu took Marc’s cool, frail hand and gripped it gently.
“You will come back?” Marc said.
“Yes.” He would let the administrators and the pilots make their demands of him, and he would have a few demands to make of them in turn.
Marc sagged forward. Radu steadied him and helped him sit in a grassy shade-swept spot beneath a wind-gnarled evergreen.
“I’ve overtired myself,” he whispered, staring at his hands hanging limp between his knees.
“I don’t doubt it,” Radu said. “Lie down. Sleep for a while.”
Then he remembered that those were the same words Marc had used just before shutting himself away in his rooms, just before his last illness.
“I seldom sleep,” Marc whispered, lying back on the grass.
“What should I do, Marc?” Radu said.
“Nothing,” Marc said. His voice became still and breathless. “I’m sorry to expose you to this…”
Radu wished he had put on his jacket so he could at least wrap it around Marc’s shoulders.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“I…” Marc’s voice failed him and he closed his eyes.
His whole body stiffened, then began to quiver. His eyelids flickered and he muttered a few words. The quivering continued for ten minutes, then stopped, and Marc’s body relaxed again.
Radu waited another ten minutes, expecting the fit to start any moment, until the movements of Marc’s closed eyes showed that he was deeply asleep and dreaming.
Radu felt pity and understanding. It was not Marc’s illness that had kept him so isolated for so long. It was — as he himself had said, back at the spaceport — his pride.
Radu heard footsteps on the trail.
Orca climbed to the crest of the island. She saw the ultra- light, and Radu with someone lying beside him, and ran toward them.
Radu put his finger to his lips. “He’s sleeping,” he said quietly.
She saw that it was Marc, let her apprehension go, and sat crosslegged beside Radu.
“Good morning.”
He leaned over and kissed her.
“It is indeed,” he said. “I came up here to watch it, and look what it brought me.”
“He used to be a pilot, didn’t he?”
“Yes. And hopes to be one again.”
“So he did come to take you back.”
“To ask me to come.”
“And?”
“I’m going to go.”
“What about the blue?”
“I want to be able to talk to her, Orca. I want to be able to tell her the name you gave me, and find out what the rest of my name is. I need to learn true speech. While I’m doing that… I’ll trade my time to the administrators, if they will cancel Twilight’s debt. Then the pilots can try to learn… whatever they think they can learn from me.”
“Can you trust them?”
“In general? Who knows? They’re people like the rest of us, not ordinary, perhaps, but people all the same. Van de Graaf? Vasili?” He laughed. “I doubt it. But I can trust Laenea, I think I can even trust Ramona-Teresa. As for Marc… Marc is too honorable to lie, even for his own benefit.” Radu put his hands gently on Orca’s bare shoulders. “And you. I should have trusted you much sooner.”
Orca gripped his forearms.
“Last night,” she said, “I saw that you’d found your place, if you wanted it. Are you sure you want to go?”
“Do you remember what you said when I told you how worried Atna was for us?”
“Of course.”
“Resonances make sense to me now,” he said. “Mine come back here, and here they stay, but for a little while longer they blend with those of the pilots. And with yours.”
“I’m glad of that.”
They hugged each other, like crew members saying goodbye, like friends saying hello.