The Heart is a Universe Read online

  One of those hoppers could drop her off on Terra Antiqua’s lesser moon, where she’d purchase a dozen new identities and a new face at the black market. After that, she could go far away, out of the Sector, out of this arm of the galaxy altogether, to places where people had never heard of Pax Cara—where she would never learn what happened to it because of her desertion.

  Practical, executable plans. They did not include room for a husband, let alone one who expected to watch reverently as she marched to her doom.

  “I’m deeply honored by your proposal, Your Highness,” she said. “Especially as I have admired you from afar for many years. But I’m not looking for a worshipper.”

  “I do not recall saying that I planned to worship you, my lady,” he said. “But I am willing, when we are alone and unclothed.”

  Something in her thudded: an unexpected careening of desire.

  In her late teens, she’d been a hedonist who’d overdosed on all the pleasures of the senses with the abandon of, well, someone about to die. Her lovers had been many and varied—fucking incandescently, as it were.

  Then a strange restlessness had taken over her, followed by an insidious belief that the Pax Cara Event was not her true purpose in life. That there was something else she must do, a task of such mind-boggling significance that her soul would be ripped apart if she did not set out on it.

  Yet she had no idea what it was, this monumental mission.

  Of course it had been only her mind playing games with her, but the mind made its own reality. She tried to reject the notion of this other purpose as a dangerous self-indulgence, as cowardice in camouflage. But like a parasite, it refused to go away.

  Slowly she began to doubt everything about her destiny as the Chosen One: when all the pretty words had been stripped away, what was it except crude human sacrifice? Then doubt had metastasized into fear and anger.

  In the early days of her crisis, she’d fucked more, not less. But the mellow, happy feelings produced by a solid orgasm had vanished. After a while she’d lost all ability to concentrate during lovemaking. If anything, her inner turmoil became starker and more suffocating when she went through the motions of coupling out of politeness—she could scarcely order her lover(s) to leave when she’d been the one who orchestrated the encounters in the first place, in the hope that sex would lighten her heart and lift her mind out of the dark bog that had begun to swallow it whole.

  It had been years since she had last lain with anyone.

  “I’ve never pictured you as a lover of women, Your Highness,” she said.

  He was a saint. And saints didn’t copulate, did they?

  “Nothing to it,” he said. “It isn’t all that difficult.”

  She chuckled, another unexpected reaction. She hadn’t found anything funny in a very long time. “I’m afraid I’ll need a greater assurance of your proficiency, sir.”

  “And how may I grant you this greater assurance, my lady?”

  “A personal demonstration would be the most straightforward means, Your Highness,” she said, mimicking his mock-serious tone.

  He smiled. She had never seen him smile, not in person, not in all the pictures of him available on the subnets. For a moment she was lost in the power of it, the sheer aura of nobility he radiated. Then his lashes lowered, his smile turned inward and secretive, and she wanted him with a force her increasingly apathetic body could barely stand.

  No, she didn’t want him, only his saintliness. She wanted to ruin it, to ravish him until his equanimity, his dignity, and his courage all lay in tatters.

  Or maybe just his virginity. He had no more slept with a woman than she had with a fish.

  “You are aware, are you not, my lady, that there is a strict no-fraternization policy in place for the duration of the summit?” he said, still smiling.

  “And you seem very glad of it, since it will excuse you from any personal demonstration.” She pushed away from him—and let him pull her back until she was encircled by his arms, their eyes locked. “Truly, I expected more candid answers from one so universally esteemed as you, sir. You’ve never made love to a woman, have you?”

  “No,” he admitted, his gaze steady.

  Steady and all-seeing, a part of her thought, for no reason she could name.

  “What about men? Or the rock gazelles that must abound near your mountain fastness?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she said. “I’ve seen pictures of rock gazelles and they are both beautiful and lissome.”

  “I prefer solitude, much as I may pine after the noble gazelles.”

  “You prefer solitude to such an extent that you have never undertaken the most fundamental human deed. Why give it up for me?”

  “To know you as I’ve always wanted to, but never had the chance.”

  She hadn’t heard words as perfect in a long time. And he spoke with the lyrical beauty of stars falling. Mere syllables acquired such depth and luster, as if they were long-buried gemstones at last faceted and set in gold.

  “No,” she said. Now they were facing the same direction, their arms around each other. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but he was a good bit thinner than she’d supposed. The slenderness of his waist, the angularity of his hipbone—he must be of a naturally very slim build. “But do know that I would have loved to make love to you.”

  Their eyes met again. His pupils dilated. His breaths became irregular. So he was capable of feeling desire—desire for her, at least.

  Her vanity was much gratified, but a new doubt skittered across the surface of her mind. Dilated pupils or not, his gaze remained clear and empathetic. Where did that empathy come from? And what was it for? If he truly believed her as brave and selfless as he’d proclaimed her to be, then shouldn’t he be regarding her in awe, rather than human understanding?

  “Would you give me a chance if you could have your cake and eat it too?” he asked softly.

  “Didn’t you just remind me of the no-fraternization policy?” Her tone was more arch than she intended.

  “There is a way around it, a sanctioned connubial assay—a trial marriage from which you could walk away the morning after.”

  She snorted. “If there is such a thing, why haven’t I heard of it before?”

  “The last one granted was over two hundred standard years ago.”

  “And you plan to accomplish the improbable and obtain one for us?”

  “I already have. It needs only your accord to become effective.”

  She laughed out of pure astonishment. Then realization hit her. “Did you arrange for me to come here?”

  The invitation had been entirely unexpected. Who would want a marriage that lasted half a standard month? But she had not looked too deeply into the matter: her entire escape plan had crystalized the moment she’d scanned the invitation.

  “I can’t say I arranged for it, but when asked, I did say you are the only one I would consider marrying.”

  Had he been anyone else, she’d have deemed his action a close relative of stalking. But he was Saint Eleian of Terra Illustrata, whose true motive she still did not understand. “What’s in it for you?”

  “The ultimate prize: a life lived incandescently.”

  She scoffed. “You will have to do much better than that. You’ve lived your life more incandescently than anyone else I can think of.”

  “Fine, then. I am the most admired man of my generation. There are only four women in this Sector who are worthy of my hand. One is old enough to be my grandmother. Two are married. So that leaves you.”

  That made more sense, but still nowhere near enough. Before she could ask her next question, however, the slow helix came to an end.

  “The two of us will lead the exit,” he reminded her, linking their hands together.

  “Which style of exit should we perform?”

  There were as many varieties of exits as there were dances. Some elegant, some athletic, some spectacularly suicidal.

  “
This is my first time in a dance sphere,” he said. “So, the simplest.”

  They leveraged off each other and pushed apart. She found purchase on the dodecahedron frame and collected the long white ribbon that came in after her.

  A bevy of princesses joined her—she felt like a raven in a flock of macaws. At the opposite pole of the dance sphere, the princes’ dress uniforms were no less resplendent. Eleian stood out in his celestial white, a seraph among gaudy mortals.

  Then he launched himself from the frame and dove toward her. Around her the princesses sighed, a collective release of breaths. Vitalis had always been drawn toward men who exuded sexual charisma. He did not radiate any such, but the sight of him mesmerized her all the same.

  She remembered the subcast she’d once seen of him, standing alone and unarmed before the steps of parliament. He’d evinced such valor and resolve that the mercenaries who had come to storm the place, with air and artillery support, had not dared to open fire. Because to harm him would have incited the wrath of an otherwise cowed populace, who loved his courage and goodness with the desperate hope of the perennially downtrodden.

  How many mortal women had the chance to lie with an angel?

  Briefly she was ashamed of the lewd direction of her thoughts—very briefly. Virgins, after all, were meant to be deflowered.

  She leaped up and joined him midair. Together they calibrated their trajectory until they centered their exit at the aperture.

  She landed lightly on her feet. He struggled with his balance. But she held firmly onto his arm and he wobbled only once.

  The light outside the dance sphere felt dim and misty. The entire ballroom appeared muted, like a holovision tuned to only half the usual saturation of color. For a moment his complexion, otherwise a lovely bronze, seemed wan and grey, the kind produced by extreme ill health.

  She did not have a chance to examine him more closely; they had to vacate the landing platform to make room for couples exiting after them. Attendants had formed an avenue beyond the carpeted ramp that led off the landing platform. They walked arm-in-arm down the avenue, as if on a royal promenade, until all the couples in the dance sphere had exited and lined up similarly.

  The partners turned to face each other. Now his color looked more normal—her eyes must have adjusted to the light. They joined hands in the traditional end-of-dance salute.

  “If tomorrow morning you do not wish to remain married to me, you leave. What do you have to lose?”

  What did she have to lose? Time, for one. There was a nine-hour gap between the end of the ball and the beginning of the next day’s festivities. Her escape would be noticed that much sooner if she waited until morning.

  “Will you give me an answer, Vitalis?”

  She could not look away from the straightforward esteem in his eyes.

  When she’d lost faith in her destiny, she’d also lost the ability to draw purpose and courage from the faith others placed in her. Their respect and admiration, filtered through the void where her convictions once lived, had become something she both feared and scorned, stinging her conscience like the tentacles of a poisonous jellyfish.

  But for some reason, his gaze provoked a different reaction—almost as if she could pretend to be the old Vitalis again. Not that she’d ever stopped putting on an act for the benefit of others, but that this time, she might believe it.

  She must not be distracted from her goal. He was an unnecessary complication. The situation was fraught enough without something as ridiculous as a trial marriage.

  It was time to give her final refusal and walk away.

  “Where is this license of yours?” she heard herself ask.

  2

  She was nothing as Eleian had imagined.

  The young woman in The Quiet Girl had emitted an otherworldly glow, an extraordinary aura of courage and conviction. He’d expected her wisdom and serenity to have distilled into sheer luminosity during the intervening years. He’d expected a hushed, almost holy presence. He’d expected, in short, a godly incarnation.

  She was not that.

  In the half hour he’d spent studying her, before asking her for the dance, she’d struck him more as a media persona than anything else. She was as deft at handling collective attention as any prince to the power born, projecting whatever it was her public sought from her—in her case, a heroic calm, a greatness of spirit, an essence of selfless sacrifice.

  Of course she’d had to learn to manage the intense publicity generated in the wake of The Quiet Girl. But he couldn’t say how he’d felt, exactly, to see that she’d proved such an apt pupil.

  She still had it—the charisma of courage, the force of destiny. But it wasn’t the same. There was something hollow about her, as if she’d lost much of her larger-than-life-ness, as if she were now merely a very clever woman manipulating the media to maintain a particularly hallowed image.

  But then he’d met her gaze. And in her eyes he’d found at once a deep weariness and a terrible intensity. He knew that look. The look of someone who knew her days were numbered.

  And suddenly he had only compassion for her. It was much easier to be wise and serene when death was still only a distant specter on the horizon. When death loomed as close as one’s own shadow, no wisdom or serenity was possible, only varying degrees of horror and numbness.

  He had been there. And never left.

  The recovery tank hissed softly as it opened. Eleian stepped into the robe his chamberlain, Alchiba, held out for him.

  “Has permission been given for Lady Vitalis’s pod to launch?”

  The VIP suites all had private pods that allowed their occupants to zip along the exterior of the liner, should they wish to visit other passengers, without traversing the vessel’s vast interior. The pods, in accordance with the Summit’s no-fraternization policy, had been disabled. Eleian had to obtain special dispensation for her to use hers—the best way to avoid media scrutiny under the circumstances.

  “The permission has been granted. But she has not left yet.”

  “The others?”

  “They are on their way, sire.”

  Eleian changed into a dark blue dress tunic. Not formal enough for a proper wedding, but perfectly adequate for a trial one. Alchiba produced a medal of honor and tried to pin it to Eleian’s chest.

  “Unnecessary,” said Eleian. “I’m afraid I need to impress the lady with something other than my past bravery.”

  Alchiba pressed his lips together. “Your Highness, are you sure you . . .”

  Eleian glanced at him. “You are not questioning my masculine prowess, are you, Master Chamberlain?”

  Alchiba laughed, if rather reluctantly. “No, sire, of course not. I’m only worried that . . . that . . .”

  That Eleian might not survive the encounter.

  Unbeknownst to those outside his immediate circle, his health had ever been in a precarious state—oscillating between merely terrible and completely catastrophic. His physicians had never permitted him any activity more strenuous than walking. For much of his adolescence he’d been in a state of collapse. Lovemaking, even had the doctors not forbidden it, would not have been possible, as he struggled to remain alive.

  In the years of his public role, when his life had seemed to be of great value to a great number of people, he’d deemed it prudent not to take the chance—which his physicians estimated at 50/50—that the shock of an orgasm would trigger massive heart failure.

  After he had entrusted head-of-state duties to his cousin and returned to private life, the subject came up for discussion one more time. His lead physician had suggested that it could be accomplished with a trained emergency responder as his partner, and with his medical team on standby in the next room. He’d decided then that sex was something he could do without—if only for the sake of his dignity.

  Or what was left of it. There was precious little dignity in being deathly ill for much of his life, in being helpless and wholly dependent on doctors and medical d
evices.

  But now he was taking a possibly fatal risk—in the hope of greater rewards.

  “I’ll be fine,” said Eleian, only half believing it himself.

  And the very real possibility of dying did not even figure as the most dangerous part of the night to come.

  The trial wedding ceremony would take place in the reception room of Eleian’s suite, with the Archbishop of Terra Illustrata officiating and the co-regents in charge of the Courtship Summit serving as witnesses.

  Eleian knew them well. Besili of Terra Viridis, stern in public, grandmotherly among family and friends, had been a close friend to Eleian’s late mother. Rianse of Terra Copiosus was Eleian’s second cousin, once removed. And he’d prayed with the archbishop many times, in the darkest days of the principality, when it had seemed that nothing could pull it out of its downward spiral.

  Alchiba served canapés and casmakiya, the famed, jet-black wine produced on the sunward slopes of Mundi Luminare’s warm, beautiful Minor Continent. Eleian’s guests took turns ribbing him for his swift success with Vitalis of Pax Cara and offered an avalanche of outrageous marital advice.

  But underneath the jollity flowed a deep unease. How, exactly, did one congratulate a couple who would have at most sixteen standard days together?

  “Lady Vitalis,” announced Alchiba.

  The company rose as she entered, her heels clicking across the gold-veined marble floor. On Pax Cara, the traditional wedding color was green, the color of life. But she had chosen to wear white, an ultrafeminine, light-as-air confection. The soft, translucent ruffles that cascaded from her right shoulder to her left knee contrasted sharply against the angular frame of her person, against the scars visible on her bare arms and calves.

  Such scars: long, short, linear, jagged. Some looked as if they’d been made by blades, some by heat, and others by shrapnel. In the golden glow of wall panels made from the light trees of Terra Viridis, her scars were beautiful, a chronicle of her life, of the hardship she had endured to prepare for her great Task.

  He was overcome with admiration—and something he almost did not recognize, because it was so alien to him.