Superluminal Read Free

We haven’t
learned ten percent of what the cousins are trying to teach us.”
    Orca sometimes wondered if that was exactly the reason she
fled to space. Her family lived among aliens, and it was clear to her, if to no
one else, that the cousins were so far beyond the family that understanding
them was impossible. In their presence she had always felt like a child, and
she knew she always would. On the starship crew she was an adult.
    She pushed off toward her brother and glided past him
underwater, turning over and blowing a stream of bubbles up against his chest,
his stomach, his genitals. He was terribly ticklish: He doubled over laughing
and turned the motion into a dive. He streaked around to chase her. Orca dove
out of the tide pool, into the sea. The cold water hit her like a shock. Her
brother was right behind her. She surfaced; he came straight up from the bottom
and propelled himself out of the water, half his height, before falling back.
    Orca scooped water up in her webbed hand and flung it
playfully at him. He sputtered and shook his head, flinging his pale hair back
from his face.
    Orca kissed him. He embraced her, then let her go.
    “Do you want company?”
    “Only if you’ll come all the way.”
    He hesitated. “No. Maybe sometime, but not now.”
    She nodded; he sank down under the surface. As he passed
beneath her he spun around, letting his hand flick up and slide along the
length of her body and legs.
    Then he was gone.
    Orca turned in the other direction, dove, and struck out
down the strait, heading for the spaceport.
    o0o
    Though Laenea felt strong enough to walk, a wheelchair carried
her through the halls as tests and questions and examinations devoured several
days in chunks and nibbles. The boredom grew more and more wearing. The pains
had faded, the accelerated healing was nearly complete, and still Laenea saw
only doctors and attendants and machines. Her friends stayed away. This was a
rite of passage she must survive alone.
    A day went by in which she saw neither the rain that passed,
nor the sunset that was obscured by fog. She asked again when she could leave
the hospital. The answers were evasions. She allowed herself to become angry,
and still no one would respond.
    Evening, back in her room: Laenea was wide awake. She lay in
bed and slid her fingers across her collarbone, down to the sternum, along the
shiny red line of the long scar. It was still tender, covered with translucent
synthetic skin, crossed once just below her breasts with a wide bandage to ease
her cracked ribs.
    The efficient new heart intrigued her. She consciously
slowed its pace, then went through the exercise of constricting and dilating
arteries and capillaries. Her biocontrol was excellent. It had to be, or she
would not have been approved for surgery.
    Slowing the pump should have produced a pleasant lethargy
and eventual sleep, but adrenaline from her anger lingered and she did not want
to rest. Nor did she want a sleeping pill. She was done with taking drugs.
Dreamless drug sleep was the worst kind of all. Fear built up, undischarged by
fantasy, producing a great and formless tension.
    The twilight was the texture of gray watered silk, opaque
and irregular. The hospital’s pastels turned cold and mysterious. Laenea
threw off the sheet. She was strong again; she was healed. She had undergone a
year of training, major surgery, and these final days of boredom to free
herself from biological rhythms. There was no reason in the world why she
should sleep, like others, when darkness fell.
    The hospital retained a few advantages of civilization. Her
clothes were in the closet, not squirreled away in some locked room. She put on
black pants, soft leather boots, and a shiny leather vest that laced up the
front, leaving her arms and neck bare. The gap between the laces revealed the
livid pilot’s scar from one sharp tip at her throat to the other below
her breastbone.
    To avoid arguments, she waited until the corridor