Superluminal by Vonda N. McIntyre

Author:Vonda N. McIntyre [McIntyre, Vonda N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mobi, alien worlds, near future, superluminal, divers, ebook, Vonda N. McIntyre, nook, science fiction, Book View Cafe, kindle, ftl, epub
ISBN: 9781611380835
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 0101-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Radu struggled with another nightmare. Laenea was on Twilight, a member of the crew of the emergency ship. The crew, rather than remaining safely in their orbiting ship, had landed with the medical team. They had arrived just as Radu had begun to feel, and deny, high fever and mental dissociation, the plague’s first symptoms. That was the reality. But in the nightmare it was Laenea who grew ill, and instead of her caring for him, he cared for her. He was afraid she would die like the others, friends and family, whom he had known would become ill but had no way to save. In the reality of the past, Laenea had saved his life. In the past of his nightmare, he saw that Laenea was dying, but refused to accept that result.

He woke. His dream, as dreams will, began to dissolve to nothingness.

He pushed at the lid of his body box. His hand encountered rough wood. In a moment of pure terror and resurging memory he jammed his hands up against the planks. He had been dying of the cold, he had been attacked by a creature. He had been taken for dead and no one had read his will. Instead of burning him and sending his ashes home, they had boxed him up and put him in the ground. A recurrent nightmare was coming true.

After the plague he dreamed over and over and over again that he had been buried along with the rest of his family and most of his friends. In the peculiar multiple time flow of the dreaming state, he saw himself as gravedigger for himself just as he had been gravedigger in dreams and in reality for his mother and for his other parents, for his sisters and brothers, one after another till he was alone. In his dreams they, and he, struggled to get out of the coffin, to throw off the thickening cover of soil, and to return to life.

I’ll never save them now, he thought. Not them, or Laenea —

The lid stayed solid above him and he flung his hands apart, searching for some weakness in his prison. One hand hit a wall, but the other clutched only air, and the combined motions made him lurch sideways.

He fell out of bed.

The air was fresh and the echoes those of a room. So many levels of dream and nightmare, memory and reality, swept around him that he wondered if he had gone mad.

The lights flicked on, bright enough to dazzle him. A vague shape jumped down beside him.

“Radu, are you all right?”

He recognized Orca’s voice. His eyes reaccustomed themselves to light. Orca sat on her heels before him, watching him anxiously.

Radu pushed himself up and looked around. Books lined two walls; the built-in bunk beds lent the cabin a nautical look. But the underwater porthole over the desk, and the chamber’s dimensions and floor plan, revealed it to be one of the ocean spaceport’s sleeping rooms.

“What happened?”

“I had a nightmare, and I remembered one I thought I was having again,” he said.

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