Radiant

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 Faberge 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.

But none of that mattered. How could I trust a lunatic in life-or-death situations? Why was Tut on active duty when anyone could see he was non compos mentis?

I asked him that once. Tut just laughed. 'They don’t need us sane, Mom. They just need us ready to bleed.' He chucked his finger under my chin like a fond uncle amused by his young niece. 'If they rejected head cases, Mom, you wouldn’t be here either.'

I was so affronted by his insinuation I stormed out of the room, stomped back to my cabin, and made thirteen statues of little gold-faced men being disemboweled by tiger-headed demons. When I showed Tut the results, he said, 'Shiny-finey! Could I eat one?' I told him no, but later I noticed my favorite demon was missing.

Two months and fifty-four statuettes later, we finally received a distress call.

At the time, Pistachio was transporting twelve dignitaries to the planet Cashleen: six officers from the navy’s Diplomatic Corps and six civilian envoys from the Technocracy’s Bureau of Foreign Affairs. Since Tut and I had no immediate duties, we always got assigned to play host for any honored guests who came aboard… but this particular group of VIPs took one look at my face and instantly became self-sufficient. My cheek had the wondrous power to make the mighty say, 'No, no, I can do my own laundry.'

So I’d had little contact with the diplomats on that flight. I didn’t even know what their mission was. However, Cashleen was the homeworld of the Cashling race — longtime allies of the Technocracy — so I assumed this was just the routine diplomacy that goes on between friendly powers.

The team of envoys certainly didn’t behave as if their trip was important. Instead of preparing for the work ahead, they spent most the voyage getting drunk and trying to seduce the better-looking members of Pistachio’s crew. For the entire week of the flight, Tut never went to bed alone. He told me, 'Hey, Mom, everyone loves to lick gold. Did you think it was just on my face?' I consoled myself with the observation that people might be eager to sleep with him once, but nobody did it a second time.

I’d never slept with Tut myself. I’d never slept with anyone. An honest-to-goodness virgin. Not literally, of course — I’d manually ruptured my maidenhead within twenty-four hours of learning what it was… mostly to spite my mother, who’d given me an infuriating lecture on remaining intact. Only afterward did I stop to think: Yes, I’ve done it, but how will my mother know? Any 'discovery scenario' I could imagine made me nauseated. Later on, I found that the thought of sex made me nauseated too. How could anyone want to do that with somebody who looked like me? Pity? Depravity? A lust so intense it didn’t give a damn what it fucked? I couldn’t conceive of a single acceptable reason why someone would sleep with me, so I fled every situation where the possibility might arise.

I was in my cabin, gouging a little hole in a Princess Gotama’s cheek so I could plant a pearl there, when the message buzzer sounded from my desk. Most likely, I thought, the diplomats wanted me to fetch another case of Divian champagne. They never wanted to see me in person, but they were quick to ask for booze to be left outside their doors. Without looking up, I said, 'What is it now?'

The ship-soul’s metallic voice spoke from the ceiling. 'Explorer Youn Suu. Captain Cohen requests your presence on the bridge. Immediately.'

I nearly threw my figurine across the room. 'Is there a response code?' I asked as I rushed to the door.

'No.' Which meant the captain hadn’t yet decided how to resolve the impending crisis. I had no doubt there was a crisis — not just because I’d been called to the bridge 'immediately' but because the call came straight from the captain to me.

I was a wet-behind-the-ears Explorer Third Class. Tut was not only more experienced than I, but he outranked me: as an Explorer Second Class, he was my superior officer. Protocol demanded that the captain address all Explorer matters to Tut, who would then bring me in if he chose. Going over Tut’s head to call me directly meant the captain thought the situation was so serious it couldn’t be left to a madman.

(Cohen knew Tut was crazy. Everybody knew. They just pretended otherwise until their backs were to the wall.)

Pistachio’s bridge was small, made smaller by two diplomats who filled the space with bustling self-importance. One was a woman no older than I. Black skin, no hair, scalp bleached paper white and covered with complex abstract tattoos in royal purple. With flawless skin and bone structure, she was almost certainly a test-tube baby like me… but from the boutique end of the black market. Tall. Strong. Amazonian. Beautifully proportioned, but with muscles like a giant panther. She wore the gold uniform of a commander in the navy’s Diplomatic Corps, plus three nonregulation diamond-stud pierce-bars mounting the bridge of her nose — a perfect example of the privileged thoroughbreds who pranced their way through the Outward Fleet’s DipCor. For centuries, our military diplomats had made themselves rich through bribe-taking, blackmail, and investments based on confidential information. Then they’d established diplomatic dynasties, bringing their offspring into the corps and speedily promoting them to lucrative posts. (Nobody my age could have earned the rank of commander.) Over the years, DipCor had become a family-run business, full of intermarried bluebloods with inflated egos and bank accounts: the last people you’d trust to work out vital treaties. These hereditary princes and princesses didn’t just live in the pleasure palace — they owned it. The woman in front of me turned in my direction, then quickly looked away… unaccustomed to sullying her eyes with beautyless things.

The other diplomat was a fortyish man, a civilian well tailored and well fed. He smelled of alcohol and his eyes were bloodshot. When he opened his mouth to yawn, his tongue was practically white, coated with the telltale signs of hangover. Or perhaps with gold dust from Tut. Unlike the female diplomat, this man didn’t avert