Radiant (2 page)

Few did.

Inevitably, my face drew the attention of the Explorer Corps. Explorers are "brave volunteers"—draftees—whom the navy sends into unknown situations. Or into known situations that are too damned dangerous for unblemished personnel.

Explorers are expendable. If someone has to die, let it be an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. Otherwise, there might be repercussions. Measurable drops in morale and productivity.

In Explorer Academy, we were forced to read studies that showed just how badly navy personnel reacted to the death of normal or attractive-looking crew members. Performance ratings plummeted; clinical depression became rampant; people on duty made serious mistakes from shock and grief. Why? Because modern society resembles a character from Bamar sacred stories... a young prince named Gotama. The prince was brought up by his royal father in a luxurious pleasure palace where he was kept unaware of old age, disease, and death. He grew up knowing only the joys of his harem, and parties and feasts and games. But the gods refused to let Gotama waste his life in superficialities. Through trickery, they showed him the ugly truths his father had concealed. When Gotama finally learned that the world had a dark side, he was devastated—affected so deeply that the experience set him on the road to enlightenment. Prince Gotama became a Buddha:
our
Buddha, the most recent in a long line of Awakened teachers who've pointed the way to wisdom.

But normal Technocracy citizens aren't ready for Buddhahood. They're not emotionally equipped to leave the pleasure palace. When confronted with anything that suggests their own mortality, they don't get stronger—they crumple.

They've never learned to live with untimely death. How could they? Old age has been alleviated by YouthBoost treatments. Disease can almost always be cured. As for fatal accidents, they're virtually nonexistent thanks to the League of Peoples. The League, headed by aliens billions of years more advanced than
Homo sapiens,
regards willful negligence as equivalent to deliberate homicide; and the League never hesitates to punish those responsible. If, for example, a corporate executive approves the design for a vehicle, or a body implant, or a nanopesticide that hasn't been sufficiently tested for safety—sufficient to satisfy the League, not just human inspectors—the negligent executive will be exterminated the next time he or she enters interstellar space. It doesn't matter if the product
is
safe; failing to test it thoroughly shows callous indifference toward the lives of others. Therefore, the League considers the culprit a "dangerous nonsentient creature"... and the League instantly kills any dangerous nonsentients attempting to leave their home star systems. There's no escape, no appeal, and no sentence but summary execution.

One has to admit it's an elegant way to keep lesser beings in check. The League doesn't directly govern humankind or the other alien species at our level of development. The League has no courts, no bureaucracies; it doesn't tell us what we should or shouldn't do. It simply kills anyone who isn't sufficiently considerate of sentient life. The onus falls on us to intuit what the League will accept. We receive no hints or guidelines—we just get killed when we don't do our best.

Which means every commercial product in the Technocracy is as safe as imperfect humans can make it. Also that human communities are built with the finest possible protections against fires, floods, etc. And that police forces are provided with all the facilities they need in order to apprehend criminals who might otherwise jeopardize innocent victims.

So, like Prince Gotama, people of the Technocracy are shielded from life's cruel grind-wheel. The only exceptions are the few men and women whose duties take them outside the pleasure palace, to places that haven't been "sanitized."

Men and women who land on unexplored planets.

Men and women called Explorers.

The navy's Explorer Corps takes in freaks from every corner of the Technocracy. People who can die and not be missed. People whose messy demise won't paralyze ship operations, or make normal-looking personnel think, "Someday I too will suffer and die."

Because if the person who dies has a weeping reeking cheek, those inside the pleasure palace are less likely to identify with the victim. When an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl gets killed, the death won't affect
real
people's performance. Why should it? She wasn't quite... quite. And the news services won't report her decease to the world at large, because then they'd have to publish her picture.

Nothing hurts a newswire's circulation figures like pictures of Explorers.

At least that's what we were told in school. Even back then, I wondered if there might be more to it: if perhaps somebody in the back rooms of government or elsewhere recognized that the Technocracy's pleasure palace culture was a dead end. Prince Gotama couldn't achieve his potential until he walked away from his harem and feasts.

Could it be the Explorer Corps was intended to follow Gotama's example? That we'd been sent down our difficult path because we alone were worthy? Or that the corps had been created for some as-yet-unrevealed purpose, and the popular belief that "ugly deaths don't hurt morale" was simply a cover-up for the truth?

The pampered mobs in the pleasure palace were too weak to become wise. Only those marked by adversity—running sores, deformed jaws, bulging eyes, angry birthmarks—had the strength to become fully free. Perhaps the Explorer Corps had been created so there'd always be a few of us who weren't sedate cattle. Perhaps some unknown bureaucrat, blessed with the stirrings of enlightenment, was offering Explorers the chance to Awaken.

Or was that wishful thinking? Given the stupidity displayed by people in power, why should I believe secret wisdom was at work? More likely, the Explorer Corps resulted from age-old hatreds against those who looked different, disguised as a branch of the navy because the League didn't allow the outright slaughter of pariahs.

Or perhaps it was the ultimate deterrent to discourage bioengineering: don't gene-splice your children, or we'll force them to become Explorers.

Klesha [Sanskrit]: Poison. Used to describe any mental attitude that leads to disruptive fixations.

I graduated from the Explorer Academy four days after I turned nineteen. A week later, I was assigned to the frigate
Pistachio.
The name made me laugh when I heard it; but tradition dictated that all vessels in the Outward Fleet be named after Old Earth trees, and only big ships got majestic titles like
Iron-wood
or
Sequoia.
Little ships like ours (a crew of thirty-five plus a handful of cadets-in-training) had to settle for names of less grandeur... and just be thankful we weren't
Sassafras, Kumquat,
or
Gum.

For two months after my arrival, I did nothing except "button-polishing"—the mundane chores required to keep my equipment in top condition.
Pistachio
didn't have anything else for me to do. Explorers on a starship filled the same niche as marines on old seagoing boats: while the regular crew ran the ship, we did whatever else was necessary. Landing on hostile planets. Boarding civilian craft suspected of breaking safety regulations. Helping to evacuate vessels in distress.

But
Pistachio
never had any such missions. We were just a utility ship, running straightforward errands in the tamest regions of space—mostly transporting personnel and materials.
Pistachio's
uninspiring work never demanded an Explorer's specialized skills. Therefore, I idled away my days like a firefighter in monsoon season, filling the time with preventive maintenance: inspecting the tightsuits we'd use for landings, calibrating my Bumbler (an all-purpose scanning/analysis device), checking the charge in my stun-pistol, and generally inventing work to keep myself from self-destructive boredom.

Despite years of rejection and being an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl, I was still "unskillful" at finding things to do on my own. In the Academy, I'd had classwork every waking moment. I'd also had fellow students who knew how it felt to watch pleasure-palace people reel away from you in disgust. On
Pistachio,
however, I'd entered a social vacuum with no friends and no pressing duties. No mother to fight with. No coping skills.

I thought I would die from loneliness—not the sharp, aching kind but the dull, ongoing blur. It can feel like fatigue that never goes away; it can feel like dissatisfaction with everything around you; it can even feel like lust, as you lie alone in the dark and pretend someone else is there.

But it's loneliness. Deep, helpless, hopeless.

I tried to clear my head with meditation, but never managed more than half an hour at a sitting. Not nearly enough to ease my restlessness. If I'd been back home, I'd have asked a spiritual master what I was doing wrong... but no one on
Pistachio
could help me, and I certainly couldn't help myself.

I found myself prowling the ship corridors at night, hoping something would happen. The engines exploding. Falling in love. Having a mystic vision. Getting a nice piece of mail.

Now and then, I contemplated becoming a drunk or nymphomaniac. Wasn't it traditional for bored, lonely people to plunge into petty vice? But that was more Western than Eastern; when Bamars went stir-crazy, they usually shaved their heads, stopped bathing, and starved themselves into oblivion. Which I might have done, except that head-shaving, etc. were favorite tricks of my mother when she wasn't getting enough attention. I swore I wouldn't go that route.

For a while, I tried to exhaust myself dancing: in my cabin, in the Explorer equipment rooms, in the corridors when I was alone. But every place on
Pistachio
felt cramped, except a few big areas like the transport bay, which always had people around. I couldn't bring myself to dance with regular crew members watching. Anyway, I hadn't danced much since I'd entered the Explorer Academy. My ballet was rusty, my flamenco lacked rhythm, my yein pwe had no grace, my derv just made me dizzy, and my freestyle... every time I started something loose and sinewy I ended up as tight as wire—stamping my feet and shedding hot tears, though I couldn't say what I was crying about.

Maybe I cried because I'd lost the flow. Once upon a time, I'd had the potential to be a dancer. Now I'd never be anything but an Explorer.

So in the end, like most Explorers, I took up a hobby. My choice was sculpture. Making figurines out of clay, wire, copper leaf, and the small industrial-grade gems that
Pistachio's
synthesizer system could produce. I found myself constructing male and female "Gotamas": princes and princesses trapped in ornate palaces that resembled Fabergé eggs. I molded expressions of horror on my Gotamas' faces as they looked through windows in their eggs and caught their first glimpses of the world outside.

After a while, I found myself spending so much time on art that I skimped on bathing and eating. I didn't shave my hair off, though—just cut it short to keep it out of my eyes.

I said I had no friends. That was true. I did, however, have a partner: a fellow Explorer. Unfortunately, he was insane.

He was a lanky loose-limbed twenty-four-year-old beanpole who called himself Tut: short for King Tutankhamen, whom Tut resembled. More specifically, he resembled Tutankhamen's funerary mask. Tut had somehow got his face permanently plated with a flexible gold alloy at the age of sixteen.

Before being metallized, he'd lived with a facial disfigurement as severe as my own. He wouldn't describe the exact nature of his problem, but once he told me, "Hey, Mom"—he always called me "Mom" because I'd introduced myself as Ma Youn Suu and "Ma" was the only syllable that stuck in Tut's brain—"Hey, Mom, I decided I'd rather soak my face in molten metal than stay the way I was. Paint your own picture."

I doubted that Tut had truly immersed his face in liquid gold (melting point 1063°C), but I couldn't rule it out. He was one of those rare individuals—always perfectly lucid, yet thoroughly out of his mind. If Tut had found himself in the same room as a vat of molten gold, he might well take one look at the bubbling metal, and think, "I could stick my face in that." Two seconds later, he'd be ears deep in yellow magma.

That was the way Tut's brain worked. Odd notions struck him several times a minute, and he couldn't judge whether those notions were merely unusual or utterly deranged. For example, he was obsessed with keeping the gold on his face "shiny-finey clean," so he constantly experimented with different kinds of polish—not just the usual oils and waxes, but also materials like ketchup, the ooze from my cheek, pureed mushrooms in hot chocolate, and his own semen. Once while we were talking in my cabin, he began going through my things, trying every garment I owned to see how well it buffed up his complexion... all while we were discussing a complicated technical bulletin on new procedures for taking alien soil samples. Every now and then, after he'd finished rubbing his metal forehead with my panties or the toe of my ballet shoe, he'd turn from the mirror and ask, "What do you think? Shiny-finey?" I'd say I couldn't see any difference, he'd nod, and we'd go back to debating the niceties of separating extraterrestrial worms from extraterrestrial loam.

In Tut's defense I'll admit he was a skilled Explorer. He'd graduated from the Academy five years before I had, and his grades had been excellent. He'd even won an award in microbiology, his field of specialization. (My specialization was biochem... a natural choice after all the hours I'd spent analyzing the fluid from my cheek.)

Tut was the sort to throw himself unreservedly into whatever he chose to do. He was a quick learner and possessed a high degree of patience—an
obsessive
degree of patience. I never had cause to criticize his handling of equipment or his knowledge of operating procedures.

But Tut was as mad as a mongoose. Not violently so—since he was still alive after five years in space, the League of Peoples obviously didn't consider him a threat to others. I often enjoyed his company, and found him helpful as a mentor: he'd had five years' on-the-job experience, and he taught me many things my academic training hadn't covered.