Superluminal

Superluminal

Vonda N. McIntyre

For Carolyn

Our Hero

by Nisi Shawl

I am not going to tell you about the time Vonda trimmed my toenails. If she were alive and in charge of this essay, she’d prefer me to dwell on that sort of demystifying anecdote, but she’s not. So I get to let my high-flown praise soar free, unhindered by her briskly deployed self-effacement. I get to say stuff like this:

Calling all who adore the sublime made actual, and all who revere those among us who are reaching beyond the comfort of assumption and habit to find new delights: Here is a set of shoulders we can stand on. Here is an oeuvre challenging the status of every quo. Vonda N. McIntyre excelled thoroughly, joyfully, fiercely, and bravely in creative writing, a genre combining the best of play and learning. In these books, she explores in skillful detail scenarios dramatizing the science fictional implications of her social justice–based philosophies. And she does this so well that even decades later they remain gratifyingly resonant with current progressive thought.

Take feminism. Vonda N. McIntyre’s books are to the tenets of feminism as constellations are to stars: her imagination knits the movement’s far-flung truths into fiery nets of meaning. Women are people, according to feminist theory, and that’s who they act like in Barbary, and the Starfarer series, and in everything Vonda wrote. Her female characters are stowaways and astronomers, doctors and mathematicians and politicians and thieves. They’re various. They’re multidimensional. And they hold together half the sky—they do things. In the novel named for her, Barbary smuggles her pet cat aboard a space station and averts galactic catastrophe. Superluminal’s Laenea Trevelyan pilots starships between galaxies. They’re active heroes—not passive, Joseph-Campbellian heroes’ rewards.

Or take anti-colonialism. Through differences imposed on their physical bodies, the characters of Fireflood and Superluminal demonstrate some of the ways colonizing systems can become deeply rooted in the colonized, and also how this rooting’s unforeseen consequences can aid activists organizing against the dominant paradigm. In The Moon and the Sun, much-scorned Caribbean colonial Marie-Josèphe fights the decadent court of Louis Quatorze for the rights of a sentient sea creature.

Then there’s the struggle to overthrow ableism. Vonda’s depiction of Marie-Josèphe’s romance with Count Lucien, a dwarf, shows her lucid understanding of the issues, a lucidity also at play in the short story Wings, and elsewhere in her work.

But don’t let all this relevance scare you. Vonda N. McIntyre’s writing is not only politically sound, it’s good. It’s gorgeous: She flew toward the mountains of sunrise until darkness engulfed her and the stars seemed so close that she might pull them across her shoulders, reads a sentence midway through The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn. It’s funny: She gave up her heart quite willingly, declares the first line of Superluminal, introducing us to its surgically modified star-pilot hero. It’s grim, sad, surprising. It’s lush when lushness serves the story’s aims, and spare when too many words would get in the way of what just must be said.

It’s a gift. And it’s ours to cherish. Ours to grow on. Ours to love. Ours to learn from. Our legacy.

Way back in 1973, one of Vonda’s earliest forays into writing science fiction, Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand, helped the genre transform itself from a literary community awkwardly stuck in valorizing patriarchal values into a wildly and joyously inclusive one. A woman’s-eye view of post-apocalyptic life and healing that draws on the author’s education in biology and genetics, that story combines rigorous science with a radically different vision of cultures to come. It won Vonda her first major award—the 1974 Nebula for Best Novelette—and became the first chapter of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel, 1979’s Dreamsnake.

Between winning her first and second Nebulas, Vonda kept pushing at the genre’s self-limitations. In 1976 she coedited the first anthology of feminist science fiction, Aurora: Beyond Equality. And before that, in 1975, she published The Exile Waiting, her first novel, a debut praised by sister-iconoclast Joanna Russ as beautifully, vividly real.

And before that, in 1971, she did me and countless other marginalized writers a solid favor by starting the six-week writing workshop Clarion West. Modeling it on the original Clarion she attended in 1970 (alongside her new friend, Octavia E. Butler), Vonda made a stunning array of teaching professionals serially available. She brought Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Frank Herbert, Avram Davidson—and more! writers galore!—together with dozens of eager students, some of them now acclaimed professionals themselves. From the get-go, Vonda imbued the workshop’s culture with her enthusiasm for diversity. It has made a literal difference in the face of the field, coloring in its membership to match humanity’s wide spectrum. Clarion West, in turn, inspired the Writing the Other book, essays, and courses I teach, courses made more accessible to would-be practitioners of inclusive writing via the Vonda N. McIntyre Sentient Squid Scholarship fund. A donation Vonda made founded the fund, which was named in honor of one of her Starfarers characters, the squidmoth Nemo. So far, it has provided Writing the Other students with over $20,000 in financial assistance.

As the years pass, I’m sure we’ll discover myriad more ways Vonda furthered science fiction’s maturation. I’m sure there are many, many accounts out there of how she supported underrepresented voices and helped some of us establish ourselves as literary forces to be reckoned with. Here are a couple of narratives I can share to illustrate this: Vonda pitched in beside me when it was time to build my website, pointing me to online resources for background graphics and offering wise and timely counsel as to the site architecture. She also answered my no-doubt-scientifically-naïve questions about how to get a character I was creating to grow gills over the course of a weekend.

I know there are other stories along these lines, just as I know that Vonda is sorely, sorely missed. I know lots of us long for the warm scones she baked and the cool jokes she made at her own expense, right up till the end. (It’s alive! she shrieked on March 28, 2019, rising claw-handed from the blankets under which she died a few days later.) I know that we who received her beaded sea creatures treasure them and wish more were being crocheted by her once-again-active fingers. And I know we wish we had more of the stories she should have, could have, would have told us. We don’t. We can’t.

But we can have these. And the more often we have them, the better.

Though she died years ago, Vonda’s work continues to blaze away in our literary heavens like newly synthesized gems. Or like relevant dreams, or like stars that are homes to mysterious aliens flying faster and further than thought. Pick a metaphor for brilliance and you’ll be describing what Vonda wrote.

Of course her stories shine brightest when they’re read. That’s the whole point of publishing them in these new editions: getting them read. Read and also reread, because each interaction between an author’s story and her audience births a new understanding of it. And each new understanding births a newly imagined world.

And each newly imagined world demonstrates her power. Ours too.

Welcome to the ever-fresh, continually expanding, immortal works of Vonda N. McIntyre. Our hero.

Chapter 1

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

After the operation, Laenea Trevelyan lived through what seemed an immense time of semiconsciousness, drugged so she would not feel the pain, kept almost insensible while drugs sped her healing. Those who watched her did not know she would have preferred consciousness and an end to her uncertainty. So she slept, shallowly, drifting toward awareness, driven back, existing in a world of nightmare. Her dulled mind suspected danger but could do nothing to protect her. She had been forced too often to sleep through danger. She would have preferred the pain.

Once Laenea almost woke: She glimpsed the sterile white walls and ceiling, blurrily, slowly recognizing what she saw. The green glow of monitoring screens flowed across her shoulder, over the scratchy sheets. Taped down, needles scraped nerves in her arm. She became aware of sounds, and heard the rhythmic thud of a beating heart.

She tried to cry out in anger and despair. Her left hand was heavy, lethargic, insensitive to her commands, but she moved it. It crawled like a spider to her right wrist and fumbled at the needles and tubes.

Air shushed from the room as the door opened. A gentle voice and a gentle touch reproved her, increased the flow of sedative, and cruelly returned her to sleep.

A tear slid back from the corner of her eye and trickled into her hair as she reentered her nightmares, accompanied by the counterpoint of a basic human rhythm, the beating of a heart, that she had hoped never to hear again.

Pastel light was Laenea’s first assurance that she would live. It gave her no comfort. Intensive care had been stark white. Yellows and greens brightened this room. The sedative wore off and she knew she would finally be allowed to wake. She did not fight the continuing drowsiness, but depression prevented anticipation of the return of her senses. She wanted only to hide within her own mind, ignoring her body, ignoring failure. She did not even know what she would do in the future; perhaps she had none anymore.

Yet the world impinged on her as she grew bored with lying still and sweaty and self-pitying. She had never been able to do simply nothing. Stubbornly she kept her eyes closed, but the sounds vibrated through her body, like shudders of cold and fear.

This was my chance, she thought, but I knew I might fail. It could have been worse, or better: I might have died.

She slid her hand up her body, from her stomach to her ribs, across the bandages and the tip of the new scar between her breasts, to her throat. Her fingers rested at the corner of her jaw, just above the carotid artery.

She could not feel her pulse.

Pushing herself up abruptly, Laenea ignored sharp twinges of pain. The vibration of a heartbeat continued beneath her palms, but now she could tell that it did not come from her own body.

The amplifier sat on the bedside table, sending out a steady low-frequency pattern. Laenea felt laughter bubbling up. She knew it would hurt and she did not care. She dragged the speaker off the table. Its cord ripped from the wall as she flung it sidearm across the room. It smashed in the corner with a satisfying clatter.

She pushed aside the sheets. She was stiff and sore. She rolled out of bed because it hurt too much to sit up. She staggered and caught herself. Fluid in her lungs coarsened her breathing. She coughed, caught her breath, coughed again. Time was a mystery, measured only by weakness. She thought the administrators fools, to force sleep into her, risk her to pneumonia, and play recorded hearts, instead of letting her wake and move and adjust to her new condition.

Barefoot, Laenea walked slowly across the cool tile to a warm patch of sunshine. She gazed out the window. The day was variegated, gray and golden. Clouds moved from the west across the mountains and the Sound while sunlight still spilled over the city. The shadows moved along the water, turning it from shattered silver to slate.

White from the heavy winter snowfall, the Olympic Mountains rose between Laenea and the port. The approaching rain hid even the trails of spacecraft escaping the earth, and the glint of shuttles returning to their target in the sea. She would see them again soon. She laughed aloud, stretching against the soreness in her chest and the ache of her ribs, throwing back her tangled wavy hair. It tickled the nape of her neck.

The door opened and air moved past her as if the room were breathing. Laenea turned and faced Dr. van de Graaf. The surgeon was tiny and frail looking, and her hands possessed strength like steel wires. She glanced at the shattered amplifier and shook her head.

Was that necessary?

Yes, Laenea said. For my peace of mind.

It was here for your peace of mind.

It has the opposite effect.

The administrators feel there’s no reason to change the procedure, she said. We’ve been doing it since the first pilots.

The administrators are known for continuing bad advice.

Well, pilot, soon you can design your own environment.

When?

Soon. I don’t mean to be obscure—I decide when you can leave the hospital, but when you may leave takes more than my word. The scar tissue needs time to strengthen. Do you want to go already? I cracked your ribs rather thoroughly.

Laenea grinned. I know. She was strapped up tight and straight, but she could feel each juncture of rib end and cartilage.

It will be a few days at least.

How long has it been?

Since surgery? About forty-eight hours.

It seemed like weeks.

Well… adjusting to all the changes at once has proved to be quite a shock for most people. Sleeping seems to help.

I’m an experiment, Laenea said. All of us are. With experiments, you should experiment.

We’ve made enough pilots so your group isn’t an experiment anymore. We’ve found this works best.

But when I heard the heartbeat, Laenea said, I thought you’d had to put me back to normal.

It’s meant to be a comforting sound.

No one else ever complained?

Not quite so strongly, van de Graaf said, then dismissed the subject. It’s done now, pilot.

It was finished, for Laenea. She shrugged. When can I leave? she asked again. The hospital was one more place of stasis that Laenea was anxious to escape.

For now, go back to bed. Morning’s soon enough to talk about the future.

Laenea turned away. The windows, the walls, the filtered air cut her off from the gray clouds and the city.

Pilot—

Rain slipped down the glass. Laenea stayed where she was. She did not feel like sleeping.

The doctor sighed. Do something for me, pilot.

Laenea shrugged again.

I want you to test your control.

Laenea acquiesced with sullen silence.

Speed your heart up slowly, and pay attention to the results.

Laenea intensified the firing of the nerve.

What do you feel?

Nothing, Laenea said, though her blood, impelled by the smooth rotary pump, rushed through what had been her pulse points: temples, throat, wrists.

Beside her the surgeon frowned. Increase a little more, but very slowly.

Laenea obeyed. Bright lights flashed just behind her vision. Her head hurt in a streak above her right eye to the back of her skull. She felt high and excited. She turned away from the window. I want to get out of here.

Van de Graaf touched her arm at the wrist; Laenea laughed aloud at the idea of feeling for her pulse. The doctor led her to a chair by the window. Sit down. But Laenea felt she could climb the helix of her dizziness: She felt no need for rest.

"Sit down." The voice was whispery, soft sand slipping across stone. Laenea obeyed.

Remember the rest of your training. It’s important to vary your blood pressure. Sit back. Slow the pump. Expand the capillaries. Relax.

Laenea called back her biocontrol. For the first time she was conscious of a presence rather than an absence. Her pulse was gone, but in its place she felt the constant quiet hum of a perfectly balanced rotary machine. It pushed her blood through her body so efficiently that the pressure would destroy her, if she let it. She relaxed and slowed the pump, expanded and contracted arterial muscles, once, twice, again. The headache, the light flashes, the ringing in her ears faded and ceased.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

That’s better, the surgeon said. Don’t forget how that feels. You can’t go at high speed very long, you’ll turn your brain to cheese. You can feel fine for quite a while, you can feel intoxicated. But the hangover is more than I care to reckon with. She folded her arms. I want to keep you here till we’re sure you can regulate the machine. I don’t like doing kidney transplants.

I can control it. Laenea began to induce a slow, arrhythmic change in the speed of the new pump, in her blood pressure. She found she could do it without thinking, as was necessary to balance the flow. Can I have the ashes of my heart?

Not yet.

But—

I want to be sure.

Somewhere in the winding concrete labyrinth of the hospital, Laenea’s heart still beat, bathed in warm saline and nutrient solution. As long as it existed, as long as it lived, Laenea would feel threatened in her ambitions. She could not be a starship pilot and remain a normal human being, with normal human rhythms. Her body still could reject the artificial heart; then she would be made ordinary again. If she could work at all she would have to remain a crew member, anesthetized throughout every journey in transit at superluminal speeds. She did not think she could stand that any longer.

I’m sure, she said. I won’t be back.

On the exposed side of a tiny, rocky island with a single twisted tree growing at its summit, Orca, the diver, lay in a tide pool, letting waves splash against her and over her. She needed a few minutes of concentration, calm, and the sea to wash away her anger. She did not want the long and pleasant swim to the spaceport spoiled, as it would be if she replayed the fight with her father again and again, trying to think of how she could have kept discussion from turning into disagreement, or how she could have made him understand her position.

The sun spread an evening dazzle across the water, reddening the clouds that concealed Vancouver Island.

In the midst of the bright waves, Orca’s brother surfaced. Treading water, he gestured to her. She shook her head and beckoned to him to come to her. His patience was ten times hers, but he was too inexperienced, too naive, to suspect she wanted him to join her because it was easier to argue about air things in surface language, or, rather, because it was easier for her to win the argument. Finally he dove again, and a moment later snaked up beside her on the rocks. Like Orca, he was small and fine boned, dark skinned and fair haired.

Dad’s upset, he said.

I figured.

She loved her younger brother, and she felt sorry for him at times like these. He had spent most of his life trying to be the intermediary between Orca and their father. Orca had long ago resigned herself to never having anything more than superficial contact with the elder diver, but her brother never gave up trying to reconcile them. Their father had been a youth during the revolution; he had fought in it. He had to accept her choosing an outside profession, one that put her in close contact with landers, but he could never be graceful about it. He was indifferent to her coworkers’ being, as she was, members of the starship crew. They were all landers to him.

Like many of his generation, though more vehemently than most, he disapproved when younger divers took salvage or exploration jobs with lander companies. He knew they needed the money for lab equipment and research materials, yet he loathed every contact divers had with ordinary people. He despised Orca’s profession, and sometimes she felt he despised her as well.

Can’t you give in just a little?

Give in! He as much as called me a coward!

He knows you aren’t that.

I think it’s his turn to apologize for a change.

He doesn’t understand your objections.

"He won’t understand, Orca said. There’s a difference."

Maybe there is, her brother said. Would you be mad at me if I told you I don’t understand, either? I’m trying, please believe me. But if you disagree with the change, why have you worked outside for so long? You make more money than anybody else in the family, you’re the one who’s paid for most of the research.

I just didn’t expect it to be done so soon, she said, knowing the excuse to be a lame one. She had tried before to explain to members of her family that she had joined the starship crew for itself, not for the pay. Her mother understood, but her father thought she said so just to make him angry, and her brother thought she only said so to keep everyone from feeling guilty because she had to spend so much time away from home.

If I get back in time, I’ll come home for the transition meeting, Orca said.

Wouldn’t it be easier to stay till afterwards? If you go, and you’re late getting home, you won’t be able to say what you think about the change.

Orca sighed and said nothing. She was sick of the argument. She had answered all the questions twenty times. It was six weeks until the meeting. If she took more leave from the crew, she would fall even further behind on the seniority list. The longer she took to work her way up, the longer before she could get on a mission more interesting than a milk run.

"I can’t talk to you up here, her brother said plaintively. Come back into the water."

When I get back in the water, Orca said, "I’m going to start swimming and I’m not going to stop till I get to the port. If you want to come along, petit frère, that’s fine." She wished he would join her; she thought it would do him good.

He let himself slide into the tide pool until only his head and shoulders rose above the water. He acted as if he might turn around and swim angrily away. But he never got angry. He found anger incomprehensible, as far as Orca could tell. Of all the divers, her younger brother was the most distant from being human. He had never been to a lander city, never worked for one of their companies, never attended a mainland school. He had met perhaps three ordinary humans in his whole life. Her brother had never even adopted a surface nickname. He and her father acted the same way, when it came to land dwellers. But their reasons were as completely different as it was possible to be. Father avoided landers because he hated and despised them. Her brother was simply uninterested.

You spend too much time with the cousins, Orca said.

You spend too little time with them, he replied. They miss you. They ask about you when you’re gone.

And, too, whenever she returned, they asked about where she had been. They listened to her descriptions of working on the crew, of being in space, of visiting alien worlds. At first they asked how it felt to travel faster than light. She regretted being unable to tell them: She, too, would have liked to know. But she was not a pilot, so she had to sleep when her ship entered transit. She could not experience superluminal travel, and survive. Though the cousins never criticized her for leaving, she often doubted that she explained her reasons as comprehensibly as she described her actions.

Her brother said sadly, I don’t understand why you go.

I have to, Orca said. She pushed herself down into the warm salty pool. This isn’t enough for me.

How can’t it be? Not enough? 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.

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 was deserted. Green paint, meant to be soothing, had gone flat and ugly with age. Her boots were silent on the resilient tile, but in the hollow shaft of the fire stairs the heels clattered against concrete, echoing past her and back. Her legs were tired when she reached bottom. She speeded the flow of blood.

Outside, mist obscured the stars. The