Physically, Pamir was his father’s child. But in temperament and emotions, he was very much like his mother.
Bracing himself, the boy asked, “Am I crazy like her?”
“No.” The man shook his head. “You’ve got her temper and some of that knife-wit. And things that nobody’s found a name for. But those voices she hears belong to her. Alone. And those foolish ideas come straight out of her sickness.”
“Can she be helped?” the boy asked.
“Probably not. Assuming she’d want to be helped, that is…”
“But maybe someday…?”
“The sad, simple truth,” his father continued, “is that these tricks keeping us young also stop us from changing. Almost without exception. A sick mind, like any good healthy one, has key patterns locked into its ultracortex. Once there, nothing gets them out.”
Pamir nodded. Without fuss and remarkable little pain, he came to terms with his mother’s condition, accepting it as another one of life’s burdens. What bothered him more—what eventually kept the young man awake at night—was that persistent and toxic idea that a human being could live for so long and see so much, yet despite standing on all that experience, he still couldn’t change his simplest nature.
If that’s true, the boy realized, then we’re all doomed.
Forever.
Pamir’s world was desert and high desiccated mountains, oxygen-impoverished air and little seas laced with toxic lithium salts. Twenty million years ago, life was abundant, but an asteroid had murdered everything larger than a microbe. Given time, new multicellular life-forms would have evolved, just as they once managed to do on the ancient, pulverized Earth. But humans didn’t give the world that opportunity. In a few decades, the colonists had spread widely, immigrants and their children creating instant cities where there was nothing but salt and rock; every sea was scrubbed clean of its toxins, then stocked with slightly tweaked but otherwise ordinary examples of earthly life; and great blue aerogel clouds sucked up the potable water, then rainboys shepherded the clouds inland and squeezed them dry, bringing soft rains to new farms and the young green forests.
By the time he was thirty, Pamir had decided that his home was a dull place being made duller by the day.
Sometimes he would lie on a high ridge, the dusty pink sky darkening as night spread, revealing an even dustier mass of cold and distant stars. And he would lift his young hand, holding it up to the sky, dwarfing all those fierce little specks of light.
That’s where I want to be, he thought to himself.
There.
As soon as escape was possible, Pamir visited his mother, hungry to tell her that he was emigrating and would never see her again.
Mother’s house was beautiful in odd ways, like its owner. She lived inside an isolated, long-dead volcanic peak. The underground mansion had a contrived, utterly crazy majesty made even more chaotic because it was perpetually under construction. Robots and tailored apes kept the atmosphere full of dusts and curses. Every room was carved from soft rock, according to Mother’s volatile plans, and most of the hallways were empty volcanic tubes aligned according to a magmatic logic.
Mother distrusted sunlight. Windows and atriums were scarce. Instead, she decorated with thick carpets of perfumed compost and manure, synthesized at great cost and leavened with the spores of tailored fungi. Mushrooms became huge in that closed, damp air, leaking a weak light, ruddy and diffuse, from beneath their broad caps. Smaller fungi and puffballs and furlike species produced gold and bluish glows. To keep the forest in check, giant beetles wandered about like cattle. And to keep the beedes under control, dragonlike lizards slithered about in the damp darkness.
It took Pamir three full days to find his mother.
She wasn’t hiding. Not from him, or from anyone. But it had been nearly five years since his last visit, and the construction crews, following her explicit directions, had closed every hallway leading to her. There was no way in but a single narrow crevice that didn’t appear on anyone’s map.
“You look upset,” were Mother’s first words.
Pamir heard her before he saw her. Trudging through the glowing forest, he came around the massive stalk of a century-old deaths-mistress mushroom, finding himself staring at a two-headed dragon. A conjoined twin, and his mother’s favorite.
Mother sat on a tall wooden chair, pretending to hold a gold-chained leash. The dragon hissed with one mouth, while the other—on the head that Pamir had never trusted—tasted the air with a flame-colored tongue.
Tasting him.
Mother was ancient, and insane, yet she always managed to look more beautiful than mad. Pamir always assumed that’s how she could lure young men to become her husbands. She was small and paler than her fungi, except for a long thick mass of black hair that only made her paleness more obvious. The sharply pretty face smiled, but in a disapproving way. She reminded her son, “You don’t visit me often enough to be a real son. So you must be an apparition.”
He carefully said nothing.
The dragon took a sliding step forward, pulling the chain out of its mistress’s hands. Both mouths gave low, menacing hisses.
“They don’t remember you,” Mother warned.
Pamir said, “Listen to me.”
His rough voice gave away everything. The woman winced and said,’Oh, no. I don’t need any sour news today, thank you.”
“I’m going to leave.”
“But you just arrived!”
“On the next starship, Mother.”
“You’re cruel, saying that.”
“Wait till I do it. That should really hurt.”
Her chair was rotting, creaking beneath her, as she lifted herself up on her sticklike arms, not quite standing, breathing in deep regular gulps.
Finally, in pain, she asked, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t care.”
“That next ship is an old bomb-wagon. The Elassia! For someone who lived as a recluse, Mother seemed in touch with everything that happened on their world. “Wait ten years,” she suggested. “A Belter liner is coming, and it’s a nice new one.”
“No, Mother.”
The woman winced again, and moaned. Then she told her private voices, “Quiet,” before she closed her eyes and began to chant, managing a ragged version of a Whistleforth prayer.
Whistleforths were a neighboring species. Tiny creatures, rather dimwitted and superstitious. A few weak-willed humans believed that the Whistleforths could see into the future as well as the remote past. Using the proper rituals coupled with a pure spirit, any species could accomplish their magic. How many times had Pamir argued the subject with this crazy woman? She didn’t understand the alien’s logic. What those little beasts believed, more than anything, was that the past was as murky as the future, their chants working in both directions, and never particularly well.
Regardless, the woman muttered the potent phrases.
Then she stepped onto the bare black ground, and lifting her long skirt, she pissed between her feet, reading the pattern of the splatters.
Finally, with a forced drama and a strange, unexpected smile, she announced, “It’s a good thing.”
She told him, “Yes, you need to leave. Right away.”
Pamir was startled, but he fought to keep his mood hidden. Stepping forward, he opened his long arms, ready to offer the old woman a kiss and a long hug. He would never again come to the place, never again see the most important person in his life; the enormity of the moment made him deeply and astonishingly sad, and a real part of him wanted to do nothing but cry.