Sight Unseen

by AnonYMous

  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 filled to the brim with overly bright images, ablur with motion. 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?”

  He shook his head. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just who are the Elders and why They persist in this strange, barbaric tradition.”

  She exhaled. “One of the first things I was told, after I became the Chosen One, was not to think ab
out that. When I turned eight—the age of reason for children on Pax Cara—I was given a more thorough explanation, which boiled down to ‘that way madness lies.’

  “Of course later I became obsessed with the question. The more I doubted the path of the Chosen One, the more I struggled with why the Elders want what They want.” She disentangled her hands from his and pushed her hair behind her ears. “But strangely enough, now that I’ve made my decision, I’ve also stopped tormenting myself about that. Instead I worry that I won’t be considered worthy to step inside the temple. If They look into my heart, what would They see except how much I hated everything and how desperate I was to run away?”

  They would see what he saw now, a woman who had wrestled with her demons—and emerged battered but victorious.

  “You judge yourself too harshly.” He took hold of her hands again. “And you compare yourself to an ideal that has no counterpart in reality. You don’t know how your predecessors felt about their role, whether they hated it more than you, or how many times they ran away. And when you look at me, you see only me standing before the steps of parliament, in seeming bravery. You don’t know that inside I was cursing myself for my foolhardiness. Why had I put myself there? Why did I think I could make any difference? Why didn’t I fall to my knees then and there and beg for my life to be spared?”

  She blinked a few times in quick succession, as if she had trouble believing him. “But you did what needed to be done.”

  “Inspired by you.” He reached out and tucked back a strand of her hair that had fallen forward again. “You were serious about living up to the demands that had been placed on you. That changed me. And that changed the lives of many. Don’t give yourself too little credit. I know what I saw in the documentary—and everything I saw was real.”

  *

  He stumbled just before they reached his bedroom. From there, things went downhill at a neck-snapping speed; the collapse arrived and there was no stopping it.

  The recovery tank wasn’t enough anymore. He was instead placed in the preservation tank, which resembled nothing so much as a large, solid casket. His physicians swarmed around. And it wasn’t until the small hours of the night, shortly before departure, that she managed to have a minute alone with him.

  “I have another secret to tell you,” she spoke to the side of the preservation tank, to the special transmitter that was supposed to send her voice directly into his cranium. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the Pax Cara Event, just me.”

  The preservation tank was not touch-sensitive. Still, she ran her fingers along its cool, marble-like top. Earlier, as she’d paced along the wall, her hands had shaken. But now they were steady again—as steady as they had ever been.

  “Not long after the filming of The Quiet Girl, I began to feel that there was something I needed to do. I had no idea what it was, only that it wasn’t the Task appointed for me. And that it was something important—something crucial.

  “At first I ignored it. Then I told myself it was my head playing games with me. But the feeling that I was turning a blind eye to an essential mission only grew stronger. Until it became a preoccupation. An obsession. Until I felt I had no choice but to run away, to give myself time to figure out what was so important that I was willing to sacrifice my own soul—and five hundred million lives.

  “I didn’t, in the end. When I returned, I expected to be tormented by this other thing that I needed to do. I expected that what had been a thorn at my side would grow to the size of a sword between my ribs. But amazingly enough, that feeling didn’t return at all—or at least it hasn’t yet.”

  And from time to time she almost felt like her old self again, the sunny, purposeful, life-loving young woman she had once been.

  She kissed the top of the preservation tank. “So that’s my secret. Not much of one, but I’ve never had someone to whom I can tell secrets, big or small.”

  Now she had at last found him. She could lose him at any moment, but he was still here—and she was still here.

  She kissed the tank again. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Chapter 7

  Vitalis’s husband survived Bridge travel, but barely. Her only contact with him was a moment with her hand against his arm—his skin cold, the sigil scalding hot—as he was lifted from the stabilization tank into the preservation tank and yet another heavy, opaque lid swung shut in her face.

  She made the decision to bypass the major hospitals on Pax Cara. His entire medical team had traveled with them, as well as all his lifesaving equipment. There was nothing anyone on Pax Cara could do for him that his own doctors couldn’t do better.

  They berthed his private cruiser in one of Pax Cara’s secondary spaceports and took a freeform lander directly to Pavonis Center. Her training mates had departed a while ago—the final weeks leading up to the Pax Cara Event should have been solitary ones for Vitalis. She had no doubt many a traditionalist grumbled about her jaunt off-planet when she was supposed to devote herself to reflection and purification.

  She could only imagine their dismay if they knew that along with her husband had come enough people to keep the training compound in a state of constant bustle.

  In a medical emergency, the most dispensable person was the spouse. She ran ten clicks each day in full infantry gear. Otherwise, when she wasn’t seeing to his staff’s comfort in her role as hostess, she spent her time in the same room as him, in a corner, keeping out of the way.

  His chamberlain was her near constant companion. They took their meals together, read together, and once even watched an episode of Captain Odyssia and the Renegades together.

  “His Highness would envy me—that I’ve enjoyed more time with Your Highness than he had,” said Alchiba one afternoon, as they sat taking tea together.

  Only days ago she would have wondered if that was really the case: if Eleian had all the time in the world to spend with her, would he still find it so easy to overlook her faults? But now she seemed to have recovered a portion of her erstwhile faith in people. She believed Eleian—that he loved her, that to him she was as miraculous as he was to her.

  She glanced at the preservation tank. “Let’s hope that His Highness will soon be in a state to envy someone. Anyone.”

  Even though she had not addressed her words to any deity, Alchiba made an upward gesture with the palm of his hand—the better to lift a prayer to the gods.

  She did too, after a moment.

  They sat silent for a while—the better for a prayer to be heard.

  Then Vitalis said, “I understand that when the time comes, the physicians will try to rouse him from this induced coma. But what if they don’t succeed? Has he left instructions, in case he remains unconscious?”

  “Yes, Your Highness. He has given very clear directions: he will go with you in whatever condition.”

  They would be together until the very end.

  “Does that worry you?” she asked. “It will be a perilous journey, to say the least.”

  “I will worry no matter what,” answered Alchiba. “But now that we have made it this far and he is still alive, I am going to let myself hope.”

  In unison they looked toward the preservation tank. Vitalis turned back to Alchiba. “You know, Master Chamberlain, I will do that too.”

  *

  The day before the Pax Cara Event, Vitalis attended a public farewell.

  The ceremony, held in the capital, was a short and simple. A child, representing all the inhabitants of the planet, read a thank-you note to Vitalis. She, in turn, gave a brief address thanking her people for the honor and privilege they had conferred upon her, and for making her time among them as bright and happy as possible.

  After her speech, she left the stage and made her way on foot to lay a wreath at the memorial dedicated to all the Chosen Ones who had gone before her. Hundreds of thousands thronged the grand boulevard. And in the air hung real-time projections of crowds in other cities and settlements, big and small, mi
llions upon millions who had turned out to say goodbye, standing shoulder to shoulder, their hands raised in salute.

  At the memorial she was met by nearly everyone who had been a significant part of her life—friends, former lovers, training mates, and some who had been all three. She laughed in surprise and delight as she embraced the filmmakers who had been responsible for The Quiet Girl. They stood in a tight circle, hand in hand, their foreheads together.

  “You have changed our lives,” they told her.

  “And you mine, more than you can possibly know.”

  As strong as she was, she needed the help of eleven others to lift the gigantic wreath, which had been made from paper butterflies, the same number as all the messages she had received from school children over the years, promising her that they would live in kindness and generosity, because every life on Pax Cara came at a cost.

  Her eyes misted. She did not love the bargain that had been struck with the Elders. But she did love her people. She had felt alienated from them for a long time, but now she wanted only for them to be happy and at peace.

  She returned to her house at sunset, the last sunset she would see in her life. How beautiful it was, and how impossibly brief.

  As soon as she could, she asked for a minute alone with her husband.

  “It’s almost time,” she said, her cheek against the top of the preservation tank. “And in case I forgot to tell you earlier, I’m not angry anymore.”

  It had been forever since she’d last had a glimpse of him, but she had never felt so close to anyone, or so at ease with herself.

  Next to the tank, the summer eternity plants grown from the seeds that he had gifted her still bloomed, but they were fading fast. The special varieties that bloomed quickly never bloomed long; the hope in her heart, however, unfurled with ever greater tenacity.

  “I love you,” she told him. “And you’ll live.”

  *

  The day of the Pax Cara Event was set by the elders, but the hour of departure was left to the discretion of the Chosen One. Noon was the most popular choice, followed closely by sunset. Vitalis, however, would begin her final journey at the stroke of midnight.