Superluminal Read Online Free PDF Page B

“What?”
    “When I was a grounder, I stared at crew, and when I
was crew I stared at pilots.”
    “I am crew,” he said defensively.
    “From —?”
    “Twilight.”
    Laenea had been there, a long while before; images of
Twilight drifted to her. It was a new world, a dark and mysterious place of
high mountains and black, brooding forests, a young world, its peaks just
formed. It was heavily wreathed in clouds that filtered out much of the visible
light but admitted the ultraviolet. Twilight: dusk, on that world. Never dawn.
No one who had ever visited Twilight would think its dimness heralded anything
but night. The people who lived there were strong and solemn, even confronting
disaster. On Twilight she had seen grief, death, loss, but never panic or
despair.
    Laenea introduced herself and offered the young man a place
nearer her own. He moved closer, reticent. “I am Radu Dracul,” he
said.
    The name touched a faint note in her memory. She followed it
until it grew loud enough to identify. She glanced over Radu Dracul’s
shoulder, as though looking for someone. “Then — where’s
Vlad?”
    Radu laughed, changing his somber expression for the first
time. He had good teeth, and deep smile lines that paralleled the drooping
sides of his mustache. “Wherever he is, I hope he stays there.”
    They smiled together.
    “This is your first tour?”
    “Is it so obvious that I’m a novice?”
    “You’re alone,” she said. “And you
were sleeping.”
    “I don’t know anyone here. I was tired,”
he said, quite reasonably.
    “After a while…” Laenea nodded toward a
nearby group of people, hyper and shrill on sleep repressors and energizers.
“You don’t sleep when you’re on the ground if there are
people to talk to, if there are other things to do. You get sick of sleep,
you’re scared of it.”
    Radu stared toward the ribald group that stumbled its way
toward the elevator. “Do all of us become like that?”
    “Most.”
    “The sleeping drugs are bad enough. They’re
necessary — everyone says. But that…” He shook his head
slowly. His forehead was smooth except for two vertical lines that appeared
between his eyebrows when he frowned; it was below his cheekbones, to the
square corner of his jaw, that his skin was scarred.
    “No one will force you,” Laenea said. She was
tempted to touch him; she would have liked to stroke his face from temple to
chin, and smooth a lock of hair rumpled by sleep. But he was unlike other
people she had met, whom she could touch and hug and go to bed with on short
acquaintance and mutual whim. Radu had about him something withdrawn and
protected, almost mysterious, an invisible wall that would only be strengthened
by an attempt, however gentle, to broach it. He carried himself, he spoke,
defensively.
    “But you think I’ll choose it myself.”
    “It doesn’t always happen,” Laenea said,
for she felt he needed reassurance; yet she also felt the need to defend
herself and her former colleagues. “We sleep so much in transit, and
it’s such a dark time, it’s so empty…”
    “Empty? Don’t you dream?”
    “No, never.”
    “I always do,” he said. “Always.”
    “I wouldn’t have minded transit time so much if
I’d ever dreamed.”
    Understanding drew Radu from his reserve. “I can see
how it might be.”
    Laenea thought of all the conversations she had had with all
the other crew she had known. The silent emptiness of their sleep was the
single constant of all their experiences. “I don’t know anyone else
like you. You’re very lucky.”
    A tiny luminous fish nosed up against the sea wall. Laenea
reached out and tapped the glass, leading the fish in a simple pattern drawn
with her fingertip.
    “I’m hungry,” she said abruptly.
“There’s a good restaurant in the point stabilizer. Will you join
me?”
    “A restaurant — where people… buy
food?”
    “Yes.”
    “I am not hungry.”
    He was a poor liar; he hesitated before the denial,