Radiant (15 page)

"Because the truth about people is scary? They're evil and ugly or something?"

"Nobody was evil or ugly. I just didn't want... it was like the Balrog was offering me an incredible gift, and I didn't know what would happen if I accepted. I was afraid of what might be expected from me."

"Huh." He looked at me. "Am I sensing a sexual subtext here? Cuz I gotta tell you, Mom, you're talking like a virgin who's afraid she's going to like it."

"Go to hell." I pushed him away and got out of my chair. "That's the last time I confide in you."

"Oh, you were confiding? No wonder I didn't recognize it. Hey, where're you going?"

I was already halfway to the door. "I'm going to my cabin. You've eaten all my supper anyway."

"Okay. Do you want me to come with you?"

I stopped and stared at him. "What?"

"Should I go with you back to your cabin?"

"Why would I want that? I'm mad at you."

"Yeah, but... I got this message from Auntie Festina..."

"Auntie?"

He shrugged. "She's obviously your sister, Mom. Think I don't see the family resemblance?"

It was a waste of time trying to reason with Tut once he'd got an idea into his head. "Okay. You got a message from Auntie Festina. What did she say?"

"She asked if I wanted to go on some dangerous mission tomorrow. I said sure, why not? She started to give reasons, like maybe she hoped I'd back out, but I kept saying no, no, I'd come along. So finally, she told me okay, but it'd be a good idea if I got my affairs in order. Took me a while to figure out what she meant, but..."

I rolled my eyes. "You thought she was telling you to have an affair."

"Aww, come on, Mom—'putting your affairs in order' is a figure of speech."

He sounded like I'd hurt his feelings by thinking he was stupid. "Sorry," I said. "My mistake."

"Auntie Festina meant I should take care of stuff in case I die tomorrow. I tried to think of anything I should take care of... and eventually, I thought of you." He rolled his chair back from the table, then turned it in my direction and kept rolling till he'd come right up to me. He was still sitting down, but with his tallness and my shortness, we were almost eye to eye. "Anything I can do for you tonight, Youn Suu?"

I couldn't remember him ever calling me by name. It took my breath away. "What are you thinking of?" I asked.

"Anything you like. Want me to play harmonica? Read you your favorite stories? Fuck you till you turn to butter? Kill you in your sleep?"

"Kill me in my sleep?"

"Well, yeah. If you can't stand the thought of becoming moss, I could save you from a fate worse than death. I haven't figured out how to kill you without the League of Peoples killing me first, but if we both put our heads together..."

"No," I said, "you don't have to do that." I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. The gold was warm with Tut's body temperature... but it was just gold, and I wished it had been flesh instead. "It's sweet of you to offer, but I'm fine, really. Shiny-finey. Best thing for both of us is to get plenty of sleep. We want to be sharp for the landing."

"Okay, Mom. But the offer's still open. Not just killing you, but any of that other stuff too."

I smiled... and for a moment I imagined saying what the hell, why die a virgin? Why not have one night, even if it's Tut? It would be painfully awkward—before, during, and after—and I couldn't imagine drowsing languidly in his arms after he'd offered to kill me in my sleep—but if not Tut, who? And if not now, when?

Silence. Then a sigh. I couldn't do it. It was too much like the fantasy scenarios that girls discuss when they're thirteen:
suppose you've got this fatal disease and the only guy you can sleep with is someone who's okay, but you don't love him at all...

I didn't feel like a bubbly girl. "Good night, Tut," I said. "See you in the morning."

He watched me all the way to the door. As I walked away down the hall, I heard him start wheeling around the mess hall on his chair, slamming into things hard.

Back in my cabin, the ship-soul informed me that the call to my mother would go through in twenty minutes. I passed the time writing a preliminary report of what happened in Zoonau—preliminary because it was just a list of point-form notes. Without too much trouble, I could have fleshed it out into a complete linear narrative, but I liked the abbreviated format better: the last, hurried testament of a tragic heroine, doomed to die on Muta or be consumed by parasitic spores. I imagined future Explorers reading my words and thinking, "How brave she was! To keep to her duty, writing reports, while staring death in the face."

(Now I think, "How childish I was! To put on a show for unknown readers in the hope of winning their pity." I certainly was my mother's daughter.)

I kept my eye on the clock as I wrote, hurrying so I'd be done in time. Exact to the second, the ship-soul announced that the call was going through... and almost immediately my mother answered.

"Raymond?" she said a bit breathlessly.

Her face on the vidscreen was made up Western style: lipstick, eyeliner, mascara. No thanaka. Though she was forty-five years old, YouthBoost treatments left her looking my age. I. In fact, she was almost my twin; the backstreet engineer had based me on Mother's DNA, so we looked very much like sisters. I'd been designed to be beautiful, so my version of her features was a little better in almost every respect—better skin, better bone structure, more lustrous hair, more luminous eyes—but she didn't have a leprous weeping cheek, which put her far ahead of me in the beauty contest. On the other hand,
my
face was washed and clean, not slathered with Caucasian makeup like a slut.

"It's me, Mother," I said... unnecessarily, because she could surely see my face on her own vidscreen. A moment later, I
knew
she could see me: her eager expression fell when she realized I wasn't the caller she hoped for.

"Who's Raymond?" I asked. I knew it didn't matter—his existence mattered, his actual identity didn't—but I couldn't help myself.

"He's just a friend," my mother said, confirming all my suspicions. "Where are you, Youn Suu?"

Not
Ma
Youn Suu. Mothers weren't required to address their daughters politely. Especially not when the daughter called with inconvenient timing. "I'm in space," I told her. "Light-years away. And I just have a single question."

"What?" Her voice went wary.

"When I was twelve, did we go to a temple together? The Ghost Fountain Pagoda. Is there really such a temple, and did anything strange happen there?"

She didn't answer immediately. Whatever question she might have expected, this wasn't it. (I wonder what she was afraid I'd ask. What secrets did my mother have that she feared I might uncover?) It took several seconds for her to switch mental tracks to what I'd actually said. "Of course there's a Ghost Fountain Pagoda," she finally replied. "We went there once or twice, but I didn't like it. Too many people. Too loud and crazy."

"Did anything unusual happen any of the times we went there?"

"How do I know what was unusual? I told you, we only went once or twice. Or three, four times, I don't remember. Not often enough to know what was usual."

"But did anything remarkable happen while we were there?" I tried not to shout. Though I hadn't talked to my mother in months, we'd fallen back into our old dysfunctional patterns: as soon as I asked a question, she instinctively tried not to answer it. But for once, I wanted to have a conversation with her that didn't end up screaming.

"What do you consider remarkable?" my mother asked, still evading the question. "People having sex out in the open?"

"No." We'd seen that at a lot of temples. The Neo-Tantric sect had a constitutional right to copulate in public, and they exercised that right whenever, wherever. "If you don't remember anything out of the ordinary, Mother, just say so."

"Why is this important?" she asked... yet again dodging the question. Despite my good intentions mere seconds before, I found myself losing my temper.

"It's important because I'm being eaten!" I snapped. "I'm infected by a parasite that may be driving me mad, and I don't know if I can trust my own memories. I thought, maybe,
maybe,
you'd help me decide if the spores were playing games with my mind. But of course I was wrong. You don't want to help me with anything, Mother. You just want me to shut up before your precious Raymond calls."

She stared at me a moment... then let out an Oh-I'm-a-martyr sigh. "Really, Youn Suu. You look perfectly fine. Nothing's eating you. Have you been taking drugs or something?"

"No. The parasite's inside me. It's an alien infestation that doesn't show up on the surface until it's too late."

"Then go see a doctor, you silly girl."

"Doctors can't help. And neither, apparently, can you. Sorry to disturb you, Mother. I won't do it again. I won't last long enough, will I?"

I almost punched the DISCONNECT button: an ingrained reflex to cut off conversation after I'd delivered a good parting shot. But I stopped myself in time. Did I want to squander my chance for truth out of sheer petty pique?

On the vidscreen, my mother looked like she knew exactly what thoughts were going through my head. She wore a "Well, are you going to do it?" expression... based, I guess, on all the times I
had
hung up on her, or stormed out of the room, or just covered my ears and screamed, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

Taking a breath, I said, "Look. Let's start over. Was there a day we went to that temple and something extraordinary happened?"

"Why do you want to know?" Again, answering my question with a question.

"Why don't you want to tell me?" I said, giving her another question back. "You're being so evasive, it sounds like something
did
happen, and you're afraid to admit it."

I paused. Mother said nothing—looking somewhere off-screen. "Don't be shy," I said. "It's not like I'll think you've gone crazy. If there's one thing I've learned as an Explorer, it's that the universe is full of strangeness. I'll believe whatever you tell me."

Mother gave me a look. "If you've finally begun to believe what I say, the universe is getting strange indeed." She sighed. "We were in the pagoda, Youn Suu. You were watching a pair of Neo-Tantrics doing their usual in a corner. You were pretending to meditate, but you were twelve years old, fascinated by all kinds of sex and not good at hiding your interest. People were watching you more than the Neo-Tants; you were so obvious, the way you kept taking oh-so-casual peeks at the couple in the corner, and I suppose a lot of folks found that cute."

"Or they just couldn't take their eyes off my cheek."

"Maybe that too," Mother said. "You always drew attention. It was hard taking you out in public. I got so embarrassed..." She shook her head. "I guess that's what happened at the temple. I was embarrassed by everybody looking at you, so I thought I'd go outside for a few minutes. Get some air. Pretend you weren't with me. But when I got to the door..."

"You
went to the door?"

"Yes. And outside, a bunch of statues were covered with stuff that hadn't been there when we came in. Purple jelly, black sand, lava... every statue had something crawling on it."

"You
saw the statues?"

"That's what I'm saying. You were too busy staring at two not-very-attractive people having sex, but I saw what I saw."

"What about the Buddha statue? The one inside the pagoda, in the fountain."

"That was the strangest part," my mother said. "I came running back inside to get you—to drag you away someplace safe, in case the stuff on the statues was dangerous—and I glanced at the Buddha, just for half a second. In that instant, the statue was suddenly replaced with a woman in a wheelchair. She was moss from the waist down, Youn Suu: glowing red moss. And she was looking at you. You had your back to her, so you didn't see. But she smiled at you. Her eyes were hidden behind her hair, but I could see her mouth, and she smiled. She lifted her hands toward you in the Wisdom mudra... then she disappeared, and the Buddha was back to normal. When I got you outside, the other statues were back to normal too. I hustled you away before anything else happened and never told you what I'd seen. Never went back to that temple either." She gave me a probing look. "Well? Was that what you wanted to hear?"

I couldn't answer—once again frozen in surprise. Kaisho Namida, the mossy woman in the wheelchair... she'd shown up on Anicca? She'd been interested in me? And she'd made the Wisdom mudra: one of the many hand gestures used to symbolize virtues and principles of faith. Had she been suggesting I needed to strive for wisdom? Was she bestowing wisdom upon me?

If she
had
given me wisdom, it wasn't enough. I didn't understand any of this. My mother had just confirmed that the events of my "memory" had actually taken place... but
she
was the one who saw the aliens, while I missed everything. And her account differed from my memory in several respects. She'd seen Kaisho in the fountain; I'd seen the Buddha covered with moss.

One thing seemed certain: the Balrog
had
played with my mind. Sort of. The spores had given me a memory of things I would have seen for myself if I hadn't been a silly twelve-year-old distracted by sex. Thanks to that artificial memory, I'd contacted my mother to find out what really happened...

...and I'd learned that seven years ago, the Balrog was already interested in me. It had sent Kaisho to "bless" me—perhaps knowing that my attention would be elsewhere and that I'd only be told the truth when my mother saw fit to share what she'd seen. The Balrog had been watching me (stalking me?) back when I was twelve: long before I became an Explorer. Now it had given me a false memory, possibly to prod me into calling my mother in search of the real story.

It wanted me to know about the temple. The Balrog was sending me a message. I just didn't understand what the message was.

"Youn Suu," Mother said, "are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I said in reflex—automatically shutting my mother out, refusing to yield information about how I really was. I forced myself to say, "Actually, I don't know how I am. I feel okay, but like I told you, I've got alien spores in my guts. Who knows what they'll do to me?" I could have told her I might end up like the wheelchair-bound moss victim she'd seen in the temple, but why sensationalize? "How are you doing?" I asked to deflect the conversation. "Is, uhh... is this Raymond nice?"