by AnonYMous
Some more esoteric schools of worship believed that the universe had burst into being as Metaran and Mikelan became one for the first time. He didn’t believe it exactly, but now he understood why they did: it was as dizzying as the rising of the sun.
Excitement fomented within him. More, surely, than he could withstand. And yet it built—and built. And built. There was no possible way he could survive this. The pleasure would kill him outright.
He held out against the onslaught of sensations, gorgeous, hot, deadly sensation. But they only grew more overwhelming. He might still have retained his control, but she shot to a climax barely short of violent. And that aroused him beyond all control.
He came in a terrifying paroxysm of pleasure.
Death be damned.
Chapter 3
When she rose, he held onto her hand. “Do not abandon your god,” he murmured.
She kissed him on the lips. “O divine one, my faith is strong and constant.”
Her words were good-natured, but the irony was evident: her faith was neither strong nor constant.
His heart almost gave out as she walked, beautifully naked, directly to the recovery tank and opened its door. The tank’s interior was smoothly lacquered and could almost pass for a piece of furniture, if it weren’t for the whirl of machinery that came to life with the opening of the doors. Gauges and sensors, unaccustomed to a healthy body, blinked and beeped in confusion. The oxygen mask swiveled uncertainly. Nozzles, fully extended and ready to spray him with priming agent, regarded her quizzically with their built-in cameras.
She closed the recovery tank’s door and inspected his other life-saving apparatuses, paying particular attention to the blood re-processor, lifting the stack of silk robes that had been placed on top to examine the artificial arteries underneath.
When she returned the stack of robes, she chose one and shrugged into it. The robe was spring-green and embroidered along the cuffs and the hems with eternity links. Belatedly he realized that he should have offered it to her: it was one of the bridegroom’s first gestures the morning after the wedding, to cloak his beloved in care and comfort.
Instead she was the one to offer a robe to him, one of similar cut and design as to hers, except burgundy in color. He put it on and hoped that the deep, warm hue would make him look less ill—but it was only a hope.
She circled the recovery tank, possibly seeking an interface. The recovery tank thwarted her search—she didn’t possess the necessary credentials yet. But that did not stop her from murmuring, “So, you are dying.”
He sat up. This discussion was always going to happen. Still, he was unaccustomed to speaking of his health to anyone but his physicians. “To the contrary, I am in a phase of relative vigor. But my condition follows a cyclical pattern. I will face an onslaught of afflictions in the next month or so.”
“And what is your chance of survival?”
“Ten percent.” He looked down at his hands. “At best.”
He was the dead man walking to her dead woman walking—a more perfect match did not currently exist in the Sector.
At least on paper, to use that archaic expression.
She sat down on a luxuriantly padded settee, one of the few pieces of furnishing in the bedroom that hadn’t been designed to prolong his life. “In other words, a death sentence.”
“More or less.”
It didn’t feel that way. In the past few hours, he had indulged in enough physical activity to give his staff a collective cardiac arrest, yet he was still well enough to stand up on his own power, and feel only a little unsteady.
But what passed for an amazing bout of fitness for him failed to impress her. She frowned as she followed his shuffling progress across the room. “One wonders why Your Highness did not think to marry sooner, when both you and I had more time.”
Her tone was light but biting.
He rested against the refreshment table, catching his breath. At his touch, a beverage mixer dispensed a frothy, mango-colored concoction. He waited another moment, made sure he was strong enough, and joined her on the settee, one glass of the traditional honeymoon ambrosia in each hand.
She accepted the glass he offered her, but set it aside—to drink would be to seal the marriage.
He tipped back his. The first sip was almost unbearably sweet. The next one, less so. The taste kept changing, the sugariness fading, replaced by a sharp acidity, and then a soul-shrinking bitterness that alternated with a chalky tastelessness.
He kept on drinking. The ambrosia was meant to convey different facets of marriage: the intoxication of new love, the inevitable disappointment, the doubt and ennui that ensued, the pain those bound by matrimony could cause each other.
More than once he thought his stomach would rebel. But he endured—and endured—until the ambrosia finally turned sweet again. Not the single-noted saccharinity from the beginning, but a rich mellowness that represented lasting love.
“Is it as awful as they say?” she asked.
He finished the last drop, wishing there had been more. But such was the nature of life: even when love became infinite, time remained scarce.
Following tradition, he kissed the rim of the empty glass before setting it down. “Yes and no, Princess.”
She was visibly taken aback at his choice of appellation. But a trial marriage, while it lasted, was still a marriage. Should he die before morning, she would be known, to the end of her days, as Her Most Serene Highness Vitalis of Terra Illustrata.
He pulled up the sleeve of his robe. “If you would put your hand here, my lady.”
She did, her callused palm warm against his skin.
Abruptly she drew her hand back and stared at where she had touched.
He didn’t need to turn his head to know what she was looking at. The markings on his upper arm materialized at the warmth of a human hand. They concentrated and reflected heat back to the source, the reason she had pulled her hand away—she would have felt a sharp increase in temperature, not enough to scald, but more than enough to alarm.
At first glance, the slate-blue design seemed to resemble the outline of a kidney bean the size of a baby’s fist. Then finer lines and smudgy patches appeared. At which point the whole entity rotated, and the lines and smudges rearranged themselves to a vague likeness of a birdcage.
“It’s said that gods, when they take on mortal incarnations, are born bearing mysterious sigils,” she said lightly. “So . . . more evidence of your godhood?”
“I wish I could say with some certainty what it is.”
No one, including himself, had been aware of the existence of the sigil during the first nine years of his life. Since then, it had only ever appeared to signal that his health, fragile enough under the best of circumstances, would soon collapse.
“Usually at this point it disappears,” he told her. “But with you, I expect the design to change again.”
The markings mutated some more, until they seemed to depict an old-fashioned horse saddle—before fading altogether.
She glanced at him, a glint of suspicion in her eyes. “What difference do I make?”
“Shortly before my second collapse, my lead physician went on a holiday to Pax Cara. She returned disappointed: she caught no glimpse at all of anything remotely associated with the Pax Cara Event, since it was forbidden to commercialize the event.
“A day after she resumed her duties, she noticed that the sigil was back—but that this time it morphed twice before fading. This lasted two days before the sigil reverted to disappearing after only one change. She speculated that the earlier difference might have had something to do with the Pax Cara radiation that she still carried from her visit.”
Vitalis frowned. “The background radiation level is considered practically undetectable, even by the most sophisticated instruments. You are saying that the sigil on your arm is such a sensitive reactor that it can discern trace amount on a person who has spent only a few days on Pax Cara and who is now a
kiloparsec removed from the source?”
“We tested her hypothesis a number of times. She was correct: at the touch of those freshly returned from Pax Cara, the sigil changed twice, rather than only once. My physicians theorized then that perhaps my illness could be cured by experiencing the Pax Cara Event up close.”
The Pax Cara Event was marked by an extraordinary burst of radiation.
And the Pax Cara Event also happened to be the occasion on which she would give her life.
She gazed at him, her expression blank.
He took a deep breath. “At that point, the next Pax Cara Event was sixteen standard years away. We had no confidence I’d live that long. Besides, we found only one instance in which a Chosen One set out with a companion—and no information was ever released on how far the companion went or whether he or she even survived.”
Her expression unchanged, she ran her hand through her short hair. “I see. But you are still alive and the next Pax Cara event will arrive at an opportune—indeed, crucial—time for you. So you decided to take the gamble, to see how close you can get to the Elders’ Temple. And to do that, you must first become my husband. So you secure me a place here, at the Courtship Summit.”
She spoke calmly and without rancor. He could not guess at which precise moment his ulterior motive had crystalized for her, but it was clear that she had suspected something for a while.
But did she suspect what he knew about her? “Except you did not accept the invitation in order to find a mate. You came because it was a path to escape.”
She recoiled—and remained silent. But her jaw was tight and her fingers dug into the padding of the settee.
“I took a walk earlier today and stopped to rest in one of the smaller gardens along the rim of the panorama deck. There I heard a rather ordinary conversation taking place between a woman and a deck steward. The woman was interested in knowing how one could get to Terra Antiqua’s moons from the liner, if one needed to shop for some items not easily found on one’s home planet for gifts. The steward was very forthcoming and not the least bit suspicious—after all, people scheme to get into the Courtship Summit, not out.
“I recognized your voice. I had half a mind to introduce myself, but you left before I could do so. Like the steward, I thought nothing of your questions, until I saw you at the ball. That was when I realized you were no longer the same girl from the documentary. That you desperately did not wish to die.”
Her throat moved. “Did you think less of me?”
She looked small. Frail. Tormented by uncertainty. And yet all he saw was the fearless young woman of yesteryear, who loved life all the more because she lived in the shadow of death.
“How could I think less of you? I wish with equal ferocity to hold on to life, one more sunrise, one more sunset, and, now that I know how it feels, another ten thousand hours in your arms.”
She pulled up her feet, as if she felt cold. Her thumb rubbed over a scar on her ankle. “Would you have told me of your precarious health, if I had not found out for myself?”
“It would be impossible for you to spend more than a few hours in my company without finding out for yourself. But yes, I would have told you before dawn, before you made up your mind whether to remain married to me or to walk away.”
She looked directly at him, her gaze not yet adversarial but devoid of warmth. “You know I agreed to the connubial assay only to satisfy my curiosity. You know that when I abscond, I will not take a spouse with me. And you know that I’m useless to you if I do not march bravely to my doom. Do you think you can change my mind, so completely and dramatically?”
When I abscond.
When, not if.
Had it come to that?
When he didn’t answer, her countenance darkened. “Have you put measures in place that would prevent me from leaving?”
“No,” he said quietly, “though I thought about it.”
Her fingers flexed. “What held you back?”
He was reminded that lovely as she was, her training had not neglected the use of deadly forces. “Your Task asks so much of you. In the end it should be no one’s choice but yours.”
She laughed, a glacial sound. “What choice? Does a little girl have a choice when she is told that the safety of everyone on the planet depends on her giving up her own life? When she is barely old enough to understand the concept of mortality, and there is a sea of grown-ups on their knees, looking at her with desperate hope in their eyes, what does she say except, yes, of course she will accept this great Task? It will be her honor and privilege.
“And then when everyone has gone, when she’s eaten all the cake her stomach can handle, when her parents have wiped away the tears in their eyes and kissed her good night, and she wonders, alone in the dark, What have I done?
“She buries the thought. But it has the habit of rising from the dead and coming to visit her. Then one day she realizes that thought has mutated. It is no longer What have I done?, but What have they done?
“Who agreed it was acceptable to practice human sacrifice? Why has this tradition been allowed to endure? Why should anyone bear this burden? Why should she?
“She gives herself all the answers that she gives to everyone else. Answers that she does her best to believes in. Until one day she sees that she doesn’t believe in anything anymore. She is someone who says one set of things and thinks quite another. In fact, in recent years she might have stopped thinking altogether. She has become a caged beast, hurtling herself at the bars.”
A caged beast, bent on escape.
He remembered the pod that had brought her here. In a pinch it could serve as an emergency vessel, more than capable of traversing the half AU between the liner and Terra Antiqua’s moons.
Had she planned to wait until he fell asleep, then steal away, ostensibly to return to her own suite, only to disappear forever?
“I will not restrain you from any course of action you choose,” he said. “Nor will I pass along information to those in charge of the summit—or to the Pax Caran delegation. Everything I’ve learned tonight I will hold in strict confidence to the end of my days.”
She stared at him, her eyes hard and mistrusting.
He reached out and took her hand. She stiffened, but he did not let go. “I’m sorry that you’ve been placed in such an untenable position. I’m sorry that there are no good choices.”
The corners of her mouth turned down. “Are you about to advise me on which path to choose?”
“How can I, when I have so much self-interest at stake?” He brought her hand to his lips. “I only wish we’d met sooner.”
She looked away. “Will you still think so kindly of me when my entire planet suffers for my selfishness?”
He would think of what must be going through her mind, knowing the consequences her choice would unleash. He could not imagine that she would be in anything other than unbearable torment.
He kissed her fingertips again.
“Are you trying to seduce me into staying?”
“I would, if I could. But I’m compelled less by strategy than a feverish desire to hold on to that which is already slipping through my fingers.”
The harshness of her expression turned into a bittersweet chagrin. “I’m sorry I can’t give you a new lease on life.”
“That new lease would have lasted two years, three at most.”
“It’s a bargain I’d have gladly taken,” she said, her voice barely audible, her gaze on the vast swath of stars beyond the clear, domed ceiling. “If anyone were to offer me two extra years, I’d accept in trembling gratitude and vow to fulfill all my obligations in the end, to live incandescently and die with dignity and whatnot.
“But I’d be lying. As time slipped by, fear and anger would overcome me again. And I would again seek to run, to disappear so completely that not even my own shadow could find me.”
He rose and retrieved the medal of honor that his chamberlain had earlier tried to pin on him. The me
dal appeared quite thick but was hollow at the center, and inside was a cache of little value to him, but possibly great use to her.
“I was given an anonymous universal passport for my service to the Sector. Since no one knew I was too ill for sightseeing and other such adventures, my peers thought it would be a nice present for a young man with time to spare.”
He extracted a small, white globe from the center of the medal, placed it in her palm, then closed his hand over it. A blue light seeped from between his fingers—and then dimmed. “It’s been transferred to you. You will now be able to pass through any and all checkpoints, and your movements will not be recorded.”
She stared at him again, this time in disbelief. “You are willing to be an accomplice in my flight?”
“You would flee with or without an accomplice. Given that is the case, there is no reason I shouldn’t try to make your life a little less cumbersome.” He squeezed her hand. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
It was not an entirely selfless gesture, of course. He would like for his generosity to give her pause, however slight.
She pulled away, the universal passport clenched in her fist. “I haven’t prepared any wedding gifts.”
“It’s all right. This night was enough.”
Her gaze shuttered. She was completely still, yet he had the impression that she was in mortal turbulence, a tiny solar-sail ship caught in a massive coronal flare.
He could not breathe.
Stay with me. Do the right thing. Do not make a choice you cannot atone for, not with a thousand lifetimes.
She leaned forward, kissed him on the cheek, and rose. “Thank you. I will see myself out.”
Chapter 4
Narrator: In a distant corner of the human sphere, on a lovely but otherwise unremarkable planet, lies a great mystery. It began two thousand and seventy years ago, shortly before the completion of terraforming.