Superluminal by Vonda N. McIntyre Read Free Book Online Page B

the foyer. The carpet was soft against her
bare toes. She fetched some clothes from the locker room, left the clothing and
her knife in an empty bedroom, and wandered down to the kitchen. A friend of
hers, a member of another diving family, sat at the table munching on a
sandwich and watching TV, an old flat-screen rerun.
    “Hi, Gray.”
    “Hi,” he said with his mouth full.
    Orca liked Gray. He was quite beautiful, too. He was taller
than average for a diver. His eyes were pale green, and he wore his sunstreaked
brown hair unfashionably long, tied at the nape of his neck with a silver
ribbon. Orca felt a familiar and pleasant surge of sexual desire. Whenever two
families of divers met, it was the custom for the young adults to go off in a
group and play. The custom continued out here, when divers from different
families visited the spaceport.
    Orca could imagine Gray’s hair fanned out against a
pillow, or drifting loose in the water.
    She pulled a couple of salmon steaks out of the
refrigerator, slapped them on the grill, opened a bottle of champagne, poured
herself a mugful, and sat down. “Can I have a bite?”
    Gray grinned and handed her half his sandwich.
“Anybody who would drink champagne out of a mug ought to have peanut
butter and jelly as an appetizer.”
    She took a bite of his sandwich and a sip of the champagne.
“Not bad.” She offered him the mug. “Want to try it?”
    He shook his head. “ Man from Atlantis is on in
a minute.”
    “Oh yeah? Which one is it?”
    “The one with the giant flying octopus.”
    Orca refilled her mug, flipped the salmon to grill on the
other side, and settled down to watch the ancient show. It had been filmed
before any divers existed, and it had everything wrong. Orca loved it. She had
never met a diver who did not enjoy it, except her father, who considered
watching it to be insufficiently dignified and politically incorrect. When they
projected it underwater the cousins sometimes joined in watching, but their
reaction was one of bemusement.
    “He is pretty,” she said during a pause
in the dialogue, when Mark Harris, the hero, was persuading the giant flying
octopus not to help Mr. Schubert, the villain, take over the world, and the
giant flying octopus was sending small squeaky noises of affection toward Mark
Harris.
    Orca liked the episodes in which Mr. Schubert appeared much
better than those in which the Navy demanded that Mark Harris perform some
military task, and he unquestioningly obeyed. When they were little, Orca and
her brother had made up stories in which Mark Harris told the military what it
could do with its silly plots, then swam away and conducted guerrilla warfare
against the landers until he had freed all the imprisoned cetaceans, scuttled
all the whaling ships, and mobilized public opinion to ban propeller-driven
craft so the sea regained its peace. That matched her people’s history
more closely. But even as a child she had forgiven Mark Harris for failing to
accomplish all those tasks. Unlike the real divers, he was all alone.
    Orca slid her salmon off the grill onto a plate and settled
down to eat in front of the TV. She took a sip of champagne, savoring the
bubbles that sent the alcohol straight to her head. The Man from Atlantis was best watched slightly drunk.
    “Want to sleep in my room tonight?” she said to
Gray.
    “Sure,” he said, and speared a bite of her fish.
    o0o
    Laenea half woke, warm, warm to her center. A recent dream swam
into her consciousness and out again, leaving no trace but the memory of its
passing. She closed her eyes and relaxed, to remember it if it would come, but
she could recall only that it was a dream of piloting a ship in transit. The
details she could not perceive. Not yet. She was left with a comfortless
excitement that upset her drowsiness. Her heart purred fast and seemed to give
off heat, though that was as impossible as that it might chill her blood.
    The room around her was dim. All she could tell