Free Superluminal by Vonda N. McIntyre Page A

the least attractive alternative.
Remaining free, adjusting without interference to the changes, meeting the
other pilots, showing Radu what was to be seen: Outwitting the administrators
would be more fun. Kathell had done her a great favor, for without her
apartment Laenea would have rented a hotel room. The records would somehow have
been made available; a polite messenger would have appeared to ask her
respectfully to come along. Should she overpower an innocent hireling and
disappear laughing? More likely she would have shrugged and gone. Fights had
never given her either excitement or pleasure. She knew what things she would
not do, ever, though she did not know what she would do now. She pondered.
    “Damn them,” she said.
    Radu sat down facing her. The couches, of course, were both
too low. Radu and Laenea looked at each other across their knees. They both
wore caftans, whose colors clashed violently. Radu lay back on the cushions,
chuckling. “You look much too undignified for anger.”
    She leaned toward him and tickled a sensitive place she had
discovered. “I’ll show you undignified —” He twisted
away and batted at her hand, but missed, laughing helplessly. When Laenea
relented, she was lying on top of him on the wide, soft couch. Radu unwound
from a defensive crouch, watching her warily, laugh lines deep around his eyes
and mouth.
    “Peace,” she said, and held up her hands. He
relaxed. Laenea picked up a fold of the material of her caftan and compared it
with one of his. “Is anything more undignified than the two of us in
colors no hallucination would have — and giggling as well?”
    “Nothing at all.” He touched her hair, her face.
“But what made you so angry?”
    “The administrators — their red tape. Their
infernal tests.” She laughed again, this time bitterly. “‘Undignified’
— some of those tests would win on that.”
    “Aren’t they necessary? For your health?”
    She told him about the hypnotics, the sedatives, the sleep,
the time she had spent being obedient. “Their redundancies have
redundancies. If I weren’t healthy I’d be out on the street wearing
my old heart. I’d be nothing.”
    “Never that.”
    But she knew of people who had failed as pilots, who were
reimplanted with their own saved hearts, and none of them had ever flown again,
as pilots, as crew, as passengers.
    “Nothing.”
    He was shaken by her vehemence. “But you’re all
right. You’re who you want to be and what you want to be.”
    “I’m angry at inconvenience,” she
admitted. “I want to be the one who shows earth to you. They want me to
spend the next month shuttling from one testing machine to another. And
I’ll have to, if they find me. My freedom’s limited.” She
felt very strongly that she needed to spend the next month in the real world,
neither hampered by experts who knew, truly, nothing, nor misdirected by
controlled environments. She did not know how to explain the feeling; she
thought it might be one of the things pilots tried to talk about during their
hesitant, unsyncopated conversations with their insufficient vocabularies.
“Yours isn’t, though, you know.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Sometimes I come back to earth and never leave the
port. It’s my home. It has everything I want or need. I can easily stay a
month and never have to admit receiving a message I don’t want.”
Her fingertips moved back and forth across the ridge of new tissue over her
breastbone. Somehow it was a comfort, though the scar was a symbol of what had
cut her off from her old friends. She needed new friends now, but she felt it
would be stupid and unfair to ask Radu to spend his first trip to earth on an
artificial island. “I have to stay here. But you don’t. Earth has a
lot of sights worth seeing.”
    He did not answer. Laenea raised her head to look at him. He
was intent and disturbed.
    “Would you be offended,” he said, “if I
told you I am not very interested in historical