He sighed. “You have the most beautiful gait, but will you please come and sit next to me so I can put my head in your lap?”
She groaned but did as he asked. “If you weren’t an invalid, I’d probably hit you.”
He reached up and touched her cheek. “And if I weren’t an invalid, I’d gladly take it.”
“So that’s it?” she grumbled, even as she took hold of his hand and pressed it to her lips. “That’s my answer? Please come and cradle me?”
“I’d have thought that the real answer is blindingly obvious.”
“I must be especially obtuse today, then. Enlighten me.”
He sighed again. “Did you not notice that Betria didn’t bother to argue with me? She could see that I’m a fool in love who wouldn’t have listened.”
Her heart thudded heavily. “You barely know me.”
“Name a person who knows you better than I do.”
She couldn’t.
He grinned, apparently gratified by her silence. “See?”
“You are just a newly deflowered virgin carried away by sexual infatuation.”
He laughed softly. “I’ll admit to being a newly—and happily—deflowered virgin. I’ll also admit to thinking that I’d willingly spend half of my life in the recovery tank, if I could spend the other half in bed with you. But neither of the above disqualifies me from being in love.”
“Well, you said it yourself, you are a fool in love. A fool.”
He pulled her down and kissed her, a long, lingering kiss. “Let me tell you a secret: it wasn’t my idea to go to the Courtship Summit. The physical toll it would take was quite enough to give me pause, let alone the fact that I would be proposing marriage to a stranger. And this is before we take into consideration that one, we had no idea what would happen to a Chosen One’s companion, and two, we had even less certainty that a huge dose of Pax Cara radiation wouldn’t kill me outright rather than turn me into a healthy man.
“My staff argued and argued the point. They were terrified that if I didn’t try something drastic, I’d die. I yielded only when Alchiba broke down in tears. And I thought I was doing it for them. So that when I’m no more, they wouldn’t berate themselves for failing to persuade me to make this last-ditch attempt.”
She would have been on her feet with shock if he hadn’t held her in place, his hand soothing on her arm.
“But when we met, something fell into place. I began to feel that you were the reason I stayed alive far longer than I ever expected to. Of course, when you left, I felt exceedingly stupid.”
A surge of shame made her look away. His hand on her chin, he tilted her face back so that she met his gaze again. “Have I ever told you that in my late adolescence, when I realized that the people of Terra Illustrata had begun to place their hope in me, I became so terrified of the mission they wished to entrust to me that I secretly prayed to die in my next collapse? That was me running away in my mind, because I wasn’t capable of the actual physical act.
“I never believed you would abandon the people of Pax Cara. The burden was settled on you before you were old enough to understand what it meant. You needed to run away, if only for the time and space to make up your mind, at last, whether you were ready to accept the Task.
“I thought there would be chaos, dismay, and widespread panic on Pax Cara, but then you would arrive at the last minute to walk the path of the Chosen One. What I had not expected, not in the very least, was that I would ever see you again. But then you came back and you were there in the garden . . .”
There was such gladness in his eyes, such luminous joy, that she felt both tears and laughter well up within her.
“I knew then I was right all along—that we were meant to meet,” he continued. “And I also knew without a doubt that I would go to Pax Cara with you. That it was the right thing to do.”
He kissed her again. “That it was the only thing to do.”
After the beach, they visited a set of sparkling caves with a deep, clear pool at its center. And then, a secluded valley ablaze with wildflowers, its air as sweet as warm honey.
He seemed a different person, matching her pace everywhere. He brought the cane she’d given him but didn’t need it at all; she was the one who huffed and puffed a little, climbing up the slopes. A number of times she caught herself staring at him, at what he could have been, had he been born with the kind of health the vast majority took for granted.
Only to realize that this newfound vitality scarcely mattered—it turned him into a better hiking companion, but couldn’t make him an iota more beautiful or charismatic.
“Oddly enough,” he said, “the last time I was in this valley, I thought of you—specifically that scene from The Quiet Girl in which you spoke about how the citizens tasked with deciding the Chosen One do the best they can—and then it’s up to the Chosen One to prove them correct. That was about six standard months ago, before my staff ever brought up the idea of the Courtship Summit, and I remember wondering whether I’d still be alive at the time of the Pax Cara Event—and how I would feel if you were to perish before I did.”
She looked up at him.
“Do you ever think about the selection committee?” He met her gaze. “About how they made the choice that determined the entire course of your life?”
They were seated on a picnic blanket, making garlands from the summer eternity flowers that bloomed all around them, she tentatively, he with surprising dexterity. And just before he spoke, she had been asking herself whether she dared think of the snuggly feeling in her heart as happiness.
She was almost glad for the distraction. “Funny you should ask. The Chosen One’s presence is requested at certain state functions. Two years ago I found myself seated next to the woman who headed the selection committee for my batch. I asked her, naturally enough, how exactly did they pick one from among all these children, as it’s extraordinarily difficult to predict what a given child will grow up to be.
“She gave me the usual spiel and I pretended to be satisfied with the answer. But some weeks later, she visited me at Pavonis Center—a citizenship privilege that very few people ever exercised, out of respect for the Chosen One’s privacy. We took a walk on the beach and that was when she told me that contrary to the belief of the public, indeed to my own belief in the matter, she felt that the selection committee had a very easy choice to make.”
Vitalis braided six long stems together, then glanced at her husband’s garland to make sure that she was proceeding correctly. “What everyone failed to consider was that the selection committee was given only a dozen candidates. And of those, some, to use her words, ‘you wouldn’t pick to lead a nursery school line to the commode.’ The committee still agonized and argued and wept, because they were, after all, choosing someone to die. But according to her the final choice was blindingly obvious from the beginning.”
He handed her another handful of long-stemmed flowers to add to her garland. “Which begs the question of how exactly the initial candidates were chosen.”
“That’s something everybody on Pax Cara knows—or think they know—because everyone has gone through the process. Around age five, everyone is given a physical exam and an intelligence test. The results are fed into a sorting algorithm and stored. The day after the Pax Cara Event has taken place, the algorithm spits out a batch of names.”
“I see. I’m going to guess that no one knows exactly how the algorithm works.”
“And everyone agrees it should be kept secret to prevent the knowledge from influencing the children’s performance.”
What she didn’t tell him, because she wasn’t sure she could accept the idea yet, was that ever since she saw the sigil on his arm, she had been wondering whether she too might possess such a thing. His only manifested itself before a health crisis. She’d never had a health crisis, so neither she nor anyone else would have seen it. But what if it had been discoverable by the physical examination part of the selection process?
But if she continued along that line of inquiry, it would mean the prince too was a Chosen One. Why should a Chosen One be born a kiloparsec away, where no one would be looking for him?
Or, to approach it from a different angle, had she actually run away, would her health have begun a precipitous decline? In fact, the reduced pace of her morning run, the burning thighs and labored breaths during part of this outing, and now—she glanced down at her largely untouched plate of picnic delicacies—an uncharacteristic lack of appetite . . .
Had the deterioration already started?
And if she thought still a little more on it, there was the matter of his unusual-for-him vitality the night they met. Was it possible that she, a lifelong resident of Pax Cara, carried enough residual radiation to briefly reinvigorate him? And that now she was no longer radioactive enough to make any difference?
“What are you thinking?” he asked gently.
She wished she could braid all her half-notions and conjectures into a semi-coherent theory, but they remained loose bits of uselessness. “I’m not sure. Just distracted, I guess.”
He smiled. “Well, your garland looks good.”
He was right. For all her distraction, it had turned out rather decent. They exchanged garlands—and a few kisses—and lay down on the picnic blanket to watch clouds amble across a cobalt blue sky.
Yes, she thought, she would call this happiness.
In the evening they dined at the audience hall with the entire staff. The prince spoke with and gave gifts to each person. Those who wouldn’t travel with him to Pax Cara wished him luck, tears shimmering in their eyes.
In her years as the Chosen One, Vitalis had attended a number of grand state functions. She’d thought this little gathering would pose no challenge at all—and was ill prepared for the outpouring of gratitude.
Toward her. And not just because she represented his last and however minuscule chance at wellness.
One after another, his staff thanked her for making him happy. She scarcely knew how to respond, so she thanked them in return, with a catch in her voice, for everything they had done for him.
It all caught up with her later, after she and the prince had taken their leave. Outside the audience hall, a summer twilight still lingered, the sky a pale lavender, the forest beyond the color of the sea at night. She stopped and closed her eyes, unable to deal with all the emotions running amok in her head.
And her heart.
He held her hand and waited.
“Would you like to try an episode of holodrama?” he asked when she was almost herself again.
She giggled from pure astonishment. “You like holodramas?”
She remembered rooms brimming with overbright and slightly blurry images. The stories were questionable and the experience far from immersive.
“Like? No, I happen to be a devotee.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You, sir, have no taste.”
“What? You need taste in a man?”
She laughed, even as the corners of her eyes moistened with tears. “You’re right—taste is completely optional. Now where is this holodrama of yours?”
His theater was an oblong building, its domed roof especially constructed to suit the projection of modern holodramas. He strapped them into a comfortably padded mobile bench, made his program selection, and instructed the theater to follow “the usual directions.”
The cavernous space darkened, then slowly lit from the periphery. “This doesn’t look all that different from what I remember,” she said.
“Wait.”
A patch of the ceiling was now orange with stripes of green and faint pink, slowly resolving into the image of a giant gas planet taking up nearly half of the sky. On the floor around them, flickering human figures popped up one by one.
She was about to say, Still no different, when everything sharpened into objects so clear and three-dimensional that she gasped. They were on an ice moon, right next to a group of heavily armed marines.
One marine, who had been crouched over something, slowly rose, her face solemn in the citrine glow of the gas giant. “We have to go. They have caught up with us.”
They leaped on their flight sticks and zoomed toward a small, scrappy-looking dropship.
“That’s Captain Odyssia?” asked Vitalis
Her husband nodded. “And these other people are her ragtag collection of renegades.”
“I’ve probably seen this story before.”
“Everybody has seen every story, but you haven’t seen this particular telling of this particular story.”
The marines neared their dropship.
Vitalis gripped Eleian’s hand. “This is all wrong.”
Eleian had never paid attention to dropships, not in all the holodramas of interplanetary conflict he had enjoyed. But she, even before the marines boarded, reported that the one shown was the wrong type for their mothership. “Deneb-class dropships only work with space elevators. They are capable of some free flight, but just enough to rendezvous with space elevators that don’t descend all the way. They can’t possibly function outside of a full-scale port.”
“So the marines need actual freeform landers?”
“Or they need a mothership capable of anchoring a mini elevator—and that’s the wrong mothership for it.”
The dropship, released again, was diving into the Jovian planet’s surface. Pillars of cloud, bathed in the light of its red giant star, rose hundreds of kilometers from the roiling depths of the atmosphere. A spectacular sight, yet she was thoroughly focused on the errors made by the production.
He laughed. “Can’t we pretend that it’s all fiction and all possible?”
She returned a wide grin. “We could have, if they hadn’t used readily identifiable vessels.”
Her expertise wasn’t limited to space-going vessels. The holodramatic marines, alas, were also far from realistic.
“Look at that!” she said indignantly. “I don’t care if it fits in your palm, a plasma bomb is not a handheld explosive device. The way it’s carried would have heated it past the detonation point in less than two minutes.
“What in the world is that sergeant doing with that gamma rifle? You can’t use it to break down doors—those things are delicate!
“Wait, now they are discarding basic sense. It doesn’t matter how pretty that bonfire is. Methane ice can’t burn in an atmosphere without oxygen.”
He didn’t think he’d ever enjoyed Captain Odyssia and the Renegades this much. “So . . . another episode?”
She thought for a moment, tapping her index finger against her lips. “Yes, you may start it now, Your Highness.”
She didn’t say much the next episode, sucked in at last by the story. As she watched Captain Odyssia’s travails, her lips slightly parted, he watched her.
Garish lights flickered across her face—the audience wanted their interstellar entities in supersaturated colors: blood-strong rays from red giants, neon blue glow for ice moons, eye-watering orange upon every blast of plasma weaponry. Yet somehow he saw only the curiosity, sadness, and brilliance of her eyes.
Beyond this night, he might never see her again.
Once she caught him staring. But she didn’t say anything before turning back to the holodrama, her features bathed in the harsh silver glare of the interior of a Dyson sphere.
At the end of the episode, he allowed the theater to remain dark, illuminated by only the faint glimmer of Captain Odyssia’s starmap, and took hold of Vitalis’s hand.
A minute of silence passed.
“Will you be all right?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
He considered a number of answers. “I don’t know,” he said in the end. “Only time will tell.”
She stroked his fingers. Her other hand, beneath his, was tightly clenched. Then she said
, “Let me tell you a secret. A real secret.”
Her tone made him sit straighter.
“You know that as the Chosen One, I’ve seen images and recordings of the recovery of my predecessors—all of them. Without exception, the term used to describe what is recovered at the shore is ‘remains,’ because that is at once the most truthful and the most diplomatic term to describe a clump of genetic material.
“You would think that might be horrifying to look at, but it never had been for me. However, there have been three instances in the history of the Pax Cara Event when the actual bodies of the Chosen Ones washed up. As cadavers go, they would be considered first rate. They were unblemished. They were dressed. And they weren’t even waterlogged.
“Yet looking at those had always been . . . difficult. They made me feel wretched, for no reason I could articulate. Then one time, I was rereading Pavonis’s letter to me, and one line stood out. He wrote, I hope I will have the courage and the worthiness to step into the Elders’ Temple. And I suddenly thought, what if those Chosen Ones who returned dead but whole, what if that meant they hadn’t been able to step into the Elders’ Temple?”
She looked at him, Captain Odyssia’s starmap reflected in the depth of her eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He hadn’t, but now he did. “The sisters you mentioned earlier—you believe the one who went as the companion also entered into the Elders’ Temple.”
“Yes. That’s why she didn’t come back.” Her voice became urgent. “So you don’t do what she did—and maybe, just maybe, you’ll come out of this alive.”
His thoughts were still tangled in her reasoning. “And those Chosen Ones who returned as whole bodies rather than clumps of genetic material, if it is as you theorize, they were judged unworthy to enter the temple, then why were there no reprisals on the part of the Elders?”
“I wonder if it’s because as long as someone showed up, They’d considered the bargain met?”
The Heart is a Universe Page 8