Neptune's Tears

by Susan Waggoner

  Zee did and her field of vision was instantly filled with about a hundred screens. ‘Eek! I feel like a fly! Help – how can I just look at one screen?’

  Bex tapped the left rim of the visor a few times and the field reduced, showing only the upper right quadrant. ‘If you want to get to one screen, just focus on the one you want, or put on the gloves and you can touch your way to it.’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Zee, pulling the headset off. ‘I think I’ll leave all of this sort of thing to you. What was I looking at, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, those are just news stories I’m watching.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ Zee said, and watched Bex glow.

  They finished the room the night before Zee had to leave and celebrated with homemade pizza, creating crazy mosaics with the toppings just like they had when Zee was Bex’s age.

  Bex couldn’t come to the vactrain station with them in the morning because she had an online editorial meeting and Zee’s father, who’d planned to drive, came down with a blinding migraine. In the end, it was just Zee and her mother waiting for the train.

  ‘I hope Dad’s okay,’ Zee fretted.

  ‘He will be. He just can’t stand to see you go is all. He really loved having you here. And you were great with him, Zee. Lately he’s been so . . .’

  ‘I know. Mom, did you see what a great job he did on the work in Bex’s room? Those built-ins he did? That kind of workmanship is pretty hard to find. Maybe now that the neo-hippies have disbanded . . . well, I bet lots of people around here would hire him to do custom work like that.’

  ‘What a great idea, Zee.’ Her mother paused. ‘I wish we saw more of you. You’ve grown up so much in the last year, and now you’re off to see that boy.’

  Zee’s eyes opened wide. ‘You know?’

  ‘Well, not for sure. Not until just now. But I had a hunch. Indonesia is a long way to go just to see Jasmine. And so suddenly. It’s that boy who took you out for your birthday, isn’t it? And helped during the bomb attacks? Don’t look so surprised. Every mother started out as a girl in love, you know, even me.’

  ‘I wish you could meet him, but everything’s so uncertain. He transferred to Indonesia because he doesn’t think we should see each other any more, since his time here is almost up and he has to go back to his home planet.’

  ‘And you’re going to talk him out of it?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. I only know I have to see him one more time. I have to make sure it’s what he wants to do, not something he’s doing to try to protect me.’ She stopped abruptly and studied her mother’s face. ‘Do you think I’m stupid for doing this? I mean, I know I’ve never had a boyfriend before, so it must seem like I’ve gone totally off the deep end and —’

  Her mother gave her a quick, hard hug. The rumbling vibrations under their feet signalled the imminent arrival of the vactrain. ‘I don’t think you’ve gone off the deep end, Zee. You could have had tons of boyfriends by now, but you always had other things on your mind. So if this boy has your heart, he must be special. And I’d hate to see you go through life without having that. You’d better go now, or you’ll miss that train. And don’t worry about your father. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Bye, Mom. I’ll email when I get there. Love you.’ Hugging her mother goodbye, Zee noticed for the first time that she was now the taller of the two of them.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE GREEN BUDDHA

  The closer Zee got, the more her doubts grew. It had been one thing to stand on the familiar vactrain platform at home and set off for parts unknown. It was another thing to actually be in parts unknown, on a mission that seemed increasingly uncertain. If David had truly cared about her, wouldn’t he have stayed? There were many moments, high over the Pacific, when her palm would close around the Neptune’s Tears necklace and she would hear Mrs Hart’s voice telling her to follow her heart.

  Jasmine and her boyfriend Rajasa met Zee at the airport, though how they found her in the shoulder-to-shoulder sea of people, Zee would never know. Rajasa was as attractive as the hologram Jasmine had sent and charming to boot, chatting easily with her, carrying her luggage – he even managed to get them a seat on an airbus so crowded that several passengers had to get off before it could even lift off the ground.

  ‘Is it rush hour already?’ Zee asked, and Raj and Jasmine laughed.

  ‘It’s always like this,’ Jasmine explained. ‘Except on holidays —’

  ‘— when it’s much worse,’ Raj finished.

  They looked at each other and smiled over the joke they’d shared many times.

  Jasmine’s apartment was tiny, barely as big as Zee’s two rooms in the residence hall, but, Jasmine told her, larger than anything most couples could afford.

  ‘Couples?’ Zee’s eyebrows lifted.

  ‘You’re the first to know,’ said Raj with a huge grin. ‘I’ve asked Princess Jasmine to marry me and she’s said yes.’

  Jasmine blushed and smiled. ‘I’m not a princess,’ she said.

  Raj looked at her with adoring eyes. ‘You’re my princess.’ He turned back to Zee. ‘Anyway, I proposed and she said yes. I have no idea why.’

  ‘Because you are so rich,’ Jasmine teased, ‘and I promised Mama I would marry a rich businessman.’

  Raj had just started his residency at the hospital where Jasmine worked as an empath. They would be poor for years, and both would earn less than they would have elsewhere, but neither seemed to mind. In this lush, crowded country of a thousand tiny islands, they had found each other and that was what mattered. Jasmine, who’d been plump and worn layers of clothes against the cold even in the middle of England’s summer, had blossomed like an exotic flower since Zee had last seen her. She’d grown thinner – ‘No chips! No more doughnuts!’ – and lost the shadow of something Zee had seen in herself, in David, and even in confident Mia – homesickness. She and Raj would live their lives where they were born. Their children would grow up with grandparents and cousins. Their work and their lives would make their country stronger, and their contentment with all of this shed light like a small sun. Zee thought of her time with David and how almost every minute seemed to have been danced on a tightrope. It was hard not to envy Jasmine and Raj, or what it would be like to be them.

  After Raj left, Zee told Jasmine about David, leaving out, as she had for her parents, Omura’s nasty habit of destroying one partner and bringing the other back home if the relationship was discovered.

  ‘And you came all this way to find him!’ Jasmine sighed. ‘He must be very special. I can’t wait to meet him!’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ Zee said. ‘I mean, what if he doesn’t want to see me?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he want to see you? Of course he’ll want to see you.’

  It had been nice to hear this, even though Zee herself was having doubts. And now, the day after, she’d been at Prambanan almost three hours and still hadn’t made her way to the building where David was working. Part of it was procrastination, she knew, but part of it was Prambanan itself. She’d been so caught up in the idea of finding David, she hadn’t given a thought to what a Hindu temple might look like.

  She’d arrived early in the morning, when the mists were still clearing. As the fog lifted, the central temples came into view, each one shaped like a torch with spiky points reaching into the sky. Getting off the airbus and starting down the broad avenue that led to the central plaza, she saw other temples, not just one or two or even a few dozen – but hundreds of them, some as tall as a house, some barely as tall as she was, some empty and some housing statues of Hindu gods and goddesses, some perfectly intact and some mysteriously toppled into ruins. But what amazed her, when she got to the large buildings, were the relief sculptures carved into the stone walls. On almost every building, panel after panel of men and women danced out stories of love, faith and passion. Each figure was so carefully carved, with an expression so different from all the others, that Zee could have recognised each of them in a crowd.
They were portraits of people who had lived over fourteen hundred years ago, yet their expressions so perfectly echoed her own hope and despair that she felt bound to them, another dancer in the endless chain.

  He had tried every way he knew to forget her. When the opportunity to transfer to the Prambanan research team came up, he volunteered immediately, and spent the rest of the afternoon feeling like he’d cut off his own arm. To board the plane, he’d told himself a fantasy about returning to London in a few weeks and watching her from afar, without letting her know.

  He wasn’t even sure exactly why he loved her, except that when he was with her he felt like someone he’d always wanted to be. He didn’t feel the weight of his family’s expectations for him, didn’t feel he was trying to find the right words to impress someone who would forever remain a mystery to him. There was no mystery with Zee. She was home to him, and he knew they were meant to be together.

  Only they couldn’t be. He’d lied to her, over and over again. Lied about who he was and why he was here, and he would never be able to tell her the truth. She who was so strong and yet so vulnerable, who had used all of her spending money to buy him the eagle talisman, then been too shy to give it to him. He would never forgive himself for failing to protect her from the cruel truths that engulfed them, truths she was not even aware of. He had no right to interfere with her life more than he already had.

  Yet even this far away, she filled the space around him. The drifting scent of flowers and citrus reminded him of her. When the wind changed and brought the warm, humid sea air inland, he thought of their day at Brighton and the way they’d kissed at the edge of the dark sea. The voices of American tourists that drifted to him as he worked were so like hers he would put down what he was doing and listen, willing it to be her. And so, one day when he left the small, sweltering manuscript room he was working in to take a break and saw, down one of the long grassy alleys between the miniature temples, a girl with auburn hair standing with her back to him, it made all the sense in the world that it would be her.

  Zee had almost decided to go back to Jasmine’s and postpone seeing him until the next day. Her emotions were tangled and she still had jet lag. But suddenly she felt the warmth of him and the call of his thoughts all around her, and turned to see him standing there.

  ‘Zee?’

  She had rehearsed a hundred things to say, from love to anger. But now, face to face, she had no words at all. They stood staring until he reached for her, wrapping her in his arms and holding her tight.

  ‘I know,’ he whispered. ‘I know.’

  Later, she would never remember exactly what they said to each other, or what was said with words and what was said without. She remembered that once they touched each other, they did not let go, and that in his embrace she felt, as she had so often before, the turmoil that held him tighter than she ever could.

  At some point she must have asked him how he could have left her the way he did, without a note and without intending to come back, because she remembered him saying, ‘It was the only way I could leave you at all, Zee. Staying would have been too dangerous, even with Mia helping us. It would have put you both in danger. So I thought if I left that way, you’d be angry enough to forget me.’

  They spent the rest of the afternoon together wandering among the temples. He showed her his favourite structures and sometimes told her the meanings of the relief carvings. Transcribing them into words was part of the research he was doing, and he knew the stories well. According to legend, the many temples of Prambanan had been built in a single night by a prince to win the heart of a beautiful young woman.

  ‘And did he?’ Zee asked.

  David shook his head. ‘No. Even after he fulfilled her challenge, she still refused to marry him. So great was her cruel indifference that the gods turned her into a serpent.’

  ‘Seems fair,’ Zee said, and they tightened their arms around each other.

  At the end of the afternoon, as he walked her to the buses at the visitor centre, he turned suddenly quiet. ‘What do we do now, Zee? Nothing has changed, you know, no matter how we feel about each other. Omura still is going to make me return. I have another two weeks of work here, and my Earth time runs out in a few months. If I’m not on a ship back, they’ll come looking for me. And they might find you. It’s too dangerous to keep seeing each other in London. I’m planning to request a rotation straight home from here.’

  The enormity of their situation washed over Zee. If it was truly as hopeless as he said . . .

  ‘Shouldn’t we at least have this?’ she asked at last. ‘If this is all we have, shouldn’t we take it? It’s not like your chip will give you away if I come to you here, not within a week. We can pretend we’re just two ordinary people. We can have more days like today. Isn’t that better than nothing at all?’

  In the end, that’s just what they did. Through an effort of imagination and will, they managed to forget their circumstances to enjoy one perfect week. Some days Zee shopped for lunch in town, then hopped on the bus to Pramabanan and surprised him with a picnic. On Jasmine’s day off, Zee toured the local arts and crafts market with her, buying presents for her family, Rani, Mrs Hart, her adviser, and even Major Dawson.

  ‘How is Rani?’ Jasmine asked as Zee paid for the handmade sandals with peacock-blue crystals that would suit Rani’s narrow, high-arched feet to a T.

  ‘You know our Rani,’ Zee laughed. ‘Breaking hearts left and right, determined never to succumb herself.’

  At sunset, David drove into town to spend the evening with Zee. Often they ate dinner with Jasmine and Raj, all four of them cooking, laughing and washing up in Jasmine’s tiny kitchen sink. One evening, Raj urged them to hurry through the meal so they could take in a real Indonesian specialty – a neighbourhood badminton match.

  David confessed he’d never seen badminton played at all. To Zee it was a lazy game played on summer holidays like the Fourth of July. Both of them were unprepared for the huge crowd that had gathered in an empty lot between large apartment buildings. There were even vendors selling flavoured ices and sweets.

  ‘There must be three hundred people here,’ David said.

  ‘Just wait until the game really gets going,’ Raj promised. Two neighbourhoods with a longstanding rivalry were going up against each other. As the weaker seeds played each other, more and more people continued to arrive. When Zee looked up, she could see people watching from apartment balconies and crowded windows. There were even people lining the roofs. It was stifling in the crowd, but the heat seemed only to increase the tension and excitement. With each round, the contestants became better and better, playing a game nothing like the lazy, lackadaisical version Zee knew. The shuttlecock flew back and forth with amazing speed. Players rarely missed making a return shot, giving their rackets so much power that the swoop of air through racket strings and resounding thwunk of the shuttlecock could be heard throughout the crowd.

  As the long summer evening grew dark, people brought old-fashioned electric lamps out to light the court, connected to outlets by extension cords that trailed out of apartment windows, a reminder to Zee that not all countries enjoyed the modern advances, and a sign of how much Jasmine must love her country, to return to help it move forward.

  By the time the top players faced off against each other, the crowd was charged with excitement. Every returned volley was cheered and every missed shot received a gasp of despair. It was past one in the morning and the noise was deafening.

  ‘Aren’t they afraid the neighbours will complain?’ Zee asked.

  ‘There’s no one to complain,’ Jasmine laughed. ‘Everyone’s here.’

  The final sets were the best, so fraught with tension Zee couldn’t look away, her eyes so focused on the flying shuttlecock she felt the image was permanently burned onto her retinas. And though David had never seen the sport before, he caught on quickly and was as into it as the rest of them.

  By the time the final winners received their r
ounds of applause, the crowd was limp with exhaustion. ‘I guess we’ll know who to watch for in the next Olympics,’ Zee commented.

  Raj shrugged. ‘These are just the neighbourhood best. Not even close to making the Olympic team.’

  The next night, David arrived with a set of borrowed rackets and a canister of shuttlecocks, and he and Zee set off for a park to try their hand. They were both miserable at it, and counted it a great success to keep the shuttlecock in the air for more than a minute at a time. Two of the shuttlecocks they lost in the shrubs, though Zee found one of them later and quietly tucked it in her pocket to keep as a souvenir. For a split-second, she remembered that she was leaving in a few days, and a sadness close to panic rose within her. Then she returned to David, smiling as best she could.

  Walking back to Jasmine’s, David asked her if there was anything special she wanted to do on her last day.

  ‘Not really,’ Zee said. The very words last day sounded like a death sentence.

  ‘Good,’ David said, ‘because there’s somewhere special I want you to see. We’ll have to leave here about four in the morning to catch it, though. Are you up for it?’

  Zee nodded. ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘No way,’ David said. ‘It’s a surprise. But I’m renting a car, so I promise to get you to the airport in plenty of time for your flight.’

  Zee packed the night before and, because she’d be gone by the time Jasmine left for the hospital, she placed the gift she’d bought her on the table. It was a beautifully embroidered bed coverlet worked in Jasmine’s favourite colours of blues and greens. Vines ran along the borders, making a home for swallows that took flight across the coverlet’s centre. Slipping away to buy it the day Jasmine took her to the art market hadn’t been easy, but Zee was sure she’d kept the purchase a secret, and smiled to think of Jasmine’s surprise. She’d just finished tucking a note into the wrappings when she heard soft footsteps on the stairs, and opened the door before David could knock. As he started downstairs with her single piece of luggage, she took a final look around the apartment. Have a happy life, Jasmine. A happy, happy life. Then she closed the door softly and hurried to follow her own fate.